New Moon Reworked
by littlebabydaisy
Summary: My reimagining of New Moon, by Stephenie Meyer, using the original as the skeleton. (Read Twilight Reworked to see the new character histories and the new way that the vampires work.) I am enhancing the strengths and removing the weaknesses of the story to create a new and exciting love story with heavier plot and character development. Please leave me feedback!
1. Preface & Chapter 1: Party

_Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again. Boy, did it scare me. You can't imagine … _

_Then I started doing something else. Every time I'd get to the end of a block I'd make believe I was talking to Allie. I'd say to him, "Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Please, Allie." And then when I'd reach the other side of the street without disappearing, I'd thank him._

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, Chapter 25

**PREFACE**

I felt like I was trapped in one of those terrifying nightmares, the one where you are faced with some unthinkable horror and cannot move your feet. The kind where your heart pounds so loudly you're sure the others in the room can hear it. Only in my case… they could. I stared around the room as the man in the suit spoke, his words washing over me.

_We know all about the events from last year. We granted her permission…_

They had agreed to let me die.

But worse than that, worse than anything I could imagine… they would now decide the fate of another. The life that meant infinitely more to me than my own.

Alice had said there was a good chance we would both die here. Perhaps the outcome would be different if I hadn't jumped. The red-haired woman wouldn't have found me, and wouldn't have then found him. This was all my fault.

_But since you are here, we wonder if you have any information about the sudden increase in numbers around your feeding grounds…_

"Wait!" I said.

They waited.

**1. PARTY**

Afterward, I knew it should have been obvious that it had been a dream. There had been so many clues. But, like anyone, I had been unable to see what was wrong until afterward.

At first, I was standing in a bright shaft of sunlight. It was the kind of sunlight that shone on Phoenix, not Forks. It was clear, clean, and dry. It was pure. It was nothing like the damp, filtered light of Forks, which seemed to always be shining through such humidity that it might as well be liquid. There were motes and dust particles that colored any light in Forks. They were gone, now.

So I should have known better.

Instead, it seemed perfectly natural to my sleeping self that the sunlight could be interchanged between the two cities, and I never questioned it. I remembered how I missed my grandmother, but not the reason why.

I looked at Grandma Marie. She had been dead for six years, but I didn't seem to remember that. Instead, I drank in the sight of her. When she was alive, she had been one of my most favorite relatives. She was sweet, charming, and had a surprisingly dirty sense of humor. I had not seen her for a long time.

She had soft, withered skin, the face of a person who had lived a thousand moments of joy, sadness, anger and love. Her skin was bent into creases that clung, gently, to the bone underneath. Like a piece of dried fruit; she had lived what I never would. The puff of thick white hair stood in a cloud around her face.

We smiled at the same time; mine a picture of surprise and happiness, hers a puckered expression of curiosity and welcoming. She hadn't been expecting to see me, either.

I had questions for her. After she had died (I remembered suddenly that she was dead, and that this could only be her spirit), I'd found myself flooded with questions. Things I had never thought to ask while she was alive. What had her childhood been like? What was her best memory? What was it like, growing up in the depression? What were her brothers like? What was school like for her? What were her childhood hopes for her future? What where her hopes for my mom, as her mother? What was it like, when she died? Where had she been? How was Grampy, and had they found each other again after death?

She opened her mouth before I could decide the best question to ask, and I paused. I'd been taught to listen first and ask questions after.

"Bella!"

It wasn't Gran who called my name, and we both turned to see the addition to our reunion. I recognized the voice so strongly that I didn't have to look, to know who it was. His voice was in my mind all the time.

Edward Cullen.

I felt my heart jump to my throat – my usual response to seeing him unexpectedly – but my excitement was quickly replaced by concern. He was walking toward us, standing in the clean sunlight.

I panicked. Gran didn't know that I was in love, much less in love with a vampire. What would she think, when the light hit him and the truth of his body was revealed? However alive his mind was, his body was something else. Not dead, not living… something in between. Something with elements that had never been researched, something that would be horrifying for its sheer impossibility to anyone who didn't know what Edward was. What would she think when he stepped into the sun, and his dark veins, filled with lifeless blood, became visible?

_Well, Gran, you might have noticed that my boyfriend changes color in the sun. It's just something he does. Don't worry about it._

What was he doing? The whole reason he lived in the northwest was to conceal the fact that direct sunlight painted him like a Jackson Pollock. To allow him to go out during the day without exposing his whole family. But here he was, strolling toward me – with a smile that couldn't be sweeter – as if I were the only one who could see him.

I grabbed my grandmother's wrist, trying to pull her attention away from Edward's sudden change in appearance. Maybe if I distracted her enough, she wouldn't realize what was happening. She wouldn't realize that I was desperately hoping that Edward would unexpectedly discover he could read my mind after all; he would go back into the shade, meet my grandmother without alerting her to what he was. I wished he would realize that I was afraid of what my grandmother would think.

I stared at him as his alienness became evident. He transformed into a creature that I would have fled from, if I hadn't known it was still Edward under the patchwork of blue veins. I turned back to Gran, my eyes wide and fearful. At the same moment, she regarded me with a look of anxiety.

She had seen him.

I looked at his face once more, trying to figure out what was going on. I didn't understand. Edward had never been so oblivious. Edward hadn't been able to show me what he was without a level of trust he didn't have with nearly anyone, much less my grandmother, who he was meeting for the first time. What had turned him into such an ignorant person?

I looked back toward my grandmother, who was giving me an apprehensive smile. I remembered – again – that she had been dead for six years.

Wait.

This didn't make sense.

I looked down at my hand, which had been gripping my grandmother's wrist. But I wasn't. My hand was outstretched and pressed against a solid surface. Glass? Something that my grandmother was also looking through.

Edward put his arm around me, his hand drifting to my hip and circling there idly.

Then, I saw a frame. Around my grandmother was an archway of gilded metal, ornately designed. Why was she trapped in glass? Who had done this?

Another Edward suddenly appeared in front of me, cradling my grandmother in the exact way he was holding me. My Edward kissed my cheek, and Gran's Edward kissed her cheek.

No. It wasn't Gran, after all. It wasn't her.

It was me.

"Happy birthday," I heard in my ear, watching as Gran's Edward whispered to her.

…..

I was suddenly awake.

There was no grogginess, no heaviness of the hands like I usually awakened to. I was instantly and horrifically lucid. My eyes roamed the room, and I gathered my bearings.

I was in my bedroom, in Forks, Washington. There was light coming through the window, but it was the dense sunlight of the Pacific Northwest, not the glaring light of Arizona.

Edward was next to me, clad in nothing but his underwear. He was still asleep, his chest rising and falling peacefully in my bed. His loveliness was almost too much to take in. His dark eyelashes brushed against his cheek, his mouth partly open as if he were about to speak. His hair was tangled; he had let it grow out some over the summer, after I complimented the length of his hair in photos from when he was still alive. Although he was pale, his lips, cheeks and fingers were rosy, as if he had just come in from the snow. I knew from this that he had recently fed.

In the previous spring, in Phoenix, we had discovered that if Edward shared my bed, he could sleep. Before then, he had not slept in almost one hundred years. I supposed it was something I took for granted… sleepiness had always felt unpleasant to me… and embarrassing when I happened to nod off in class.

But Edward's delight in sleeping – in _dreaming_ – had been remarkable. I'd never thought of sleeping as something one could miss, but I supposed it would be wearing to have your brain turned on every minute of the day, to be unable to check out and refresh yourself in any way. And, as Edward had rediscovered, dreams were truly incredible. His mother had been dead since 1918, but when he dreamed he could see her face again, speak to her, and experience something that was so nearly real. At least three nights a week, Edward had begun staying in my bed with me during the night.

It was strictly secret, of course. My father didn't know. If he did, he would have forbidden all contact with Edward, worried about my chastity. He also didn't know that Edward and I had lost our virginity to each other the year before, and that most nights Edward stayed with me, we reinforced that decision.

I couldn't help but smile at the sweetness of the face sleeping next to me. It wasn't that he was less adorable while he was awake, but there was something innocent about a person who was sleeping. Perhaps it was simply the knowledge of my own dreams… I often dreamt I was still a child. Maybe it was just that I imagined him dreaming the same. Either way, I loved to see him sleep, and it was a rarity because he normally woke before me.

As I absorbed the image of his beautiful face next to me, I remembered something. "Happy birthday," Edward had whispered in my dream. And it was my birthday. I was eighteen years old, today. One year older than Edward was allowed, in his human life.

It seemed unfair, somehow. Edward was so wonderful, and over the summer he had shared more of his human life with me than I could have imagined. Not only was Edward a good person now, but he had been a good person when he was seventeen years old, in 1918.

But he had still died.

How could it be that I, who had surrounded myself with dangerous vampires that could kill me in mere seconds, was still alive? I had even been tracked and tricked by a particularly lethal breed of vampire, and had managed to overcome him. I had survived the inferno that had followed my setting him on fire, even though I'd lost consciousness shortly after my attack. Because of Edward. Because Edward had run into a fire that could have consumed him in a flash, to pull my mother and my unconscious form from the blaze.

So much of it was luck.

I wasn't used to believing in luck. I'd always thought that you could achieve anything, if you worked hard enough. But that wasn't the only factor in the 'life' equation. You could work until your fingers bled, and it wouldn't matter at all if you didn't have luck on your side.

I touched Edward's face, tracing his cheekbone and letting my hand fall into his hair, feeling the fine texture and enjoying the soft sigh that Edward gave at my touch. I relaxed into my pillow as his arms drew around me instinctively. Then, his eyes opened.

They were the deepest of reds, the color of a dark wine. When I'd been in mortal danger some months ago, Edward had drunk a bag of human blood that he'd taken from a hospital. He normally only drank from animals, but the man attacking me was a vampire who fed only from humans, which gave him a debilitating edge over the vampires that valued human life. Ever since, Edward's eyes had shifted from their normal, beautiful amber color to the heavy red that man-eating vampires sported. I knew he was ashamed of his eyes, and I wondered when they would go back to their normal state. It had been months, but that hadn't seemed to change their tint at all. I wanted to ask him how long it would take, but I knew that if I did he would become self-conscious.

Edward stretched, his mind getting more alert.

"It's really something, sleeping." He said, his voice graveled from a night of disuse. "I never get bored of it. When I was a human…" he drifted off in groggy thought.

"What?" I asked.

"When I was a human, I thought it was a waste of time." He yawned. "But I never realized how fulfilling it is. After so long without it… I can't get over how wonderful it is to wake up. First you're hazy, then you feel your body waking up, and then you're up. And you feel amazing."

"Did you dream, tonight?" I asked. It seemed he dreamed every night that we spent together. I only remembered mine sometimes, but Edward was different. He had vivid, colorful dreams that were so real to him that he often woke up with surprise at where he was.

"Yes," he said, his voice sounding oddly distressed. "I dreamt I was back in the hospital. When I caught the Spanish flu, I mean."

I looked at his face for a long moment. "What was it like?"

"Awful." He said. "The regular flu is bad on its own, but this one… as it got worse, I started coughing so hard that my abdominal muscles tore. I bled from my mouth, my nose… even my ears. Carlisle says my skin turned blue because I couldn't breathe."

"My god…"

"A lot of times, people died only hours after their symptoms appeared. I was luckier. I lasted several days."

"Didn't you say that it targeted young people?"

"Yes. People who were very healthy were hit the hardest, they think it caused people's own immune systems to turn on them." He stretched again. "After that, I had another dream. I dreamt Emmett was born as my brother, rather than us both being adopted, and that we decided to sail to the North Pole with Shackleton. Which is silly, because Shackleton went to the South Pole. But when we got there, expecting ice, we discovered that it was a tropical beach. I was disappointed, but Emmett got a tan."

I laughed that such a serious and emotional dream could be followed by something so ridiculous. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. I followed his lead, picking up my hairbrush to work out the tangles in my hair. "Did you dream?" He asked.

"No." I said. Something about the tone I used alerted Edward to my deception. Unlike the rest of the human world, Edward Cullen couldn't read my mind. However, we'd gotten close enough now that he could read me better than most people.

"Are you sure?" He said, a vague smile playing on his perfect lips.

I sighed. "I dreamt that my grandmother was in front of me. We were standing in the meadow, the one you showed me. I was about to talk to her, but you walked out into the sunlight and I was afraid of what she would think when she saw you. I reached out to touch her, and it wasn't her. It was a mirror. It was me. I was an old, withered person and you were still there, looking the same as you always do."

Edward turned his gaze away from me, pushing his hand through his thick hair as if to straighten it out. I knew how he felt about turning me into a vampire. He had refused the last time we'd talked about it, and we'd had an argument. I didn't really want to bring it up again. At least not right now, when he was just getting up, looking so sweet and happy.

I smiled at him, and shifted on the bed so that I faced him.

"That's not going to work, Edward," I said, pulling his hand away from his head. I ran my brush through his hair. Unfortunately, the bedhead wasn't dismissed so easily, his hair springing back into place almost immediately. I grinned at him. "You know, you have the most hopelessly stubborn hair I have ever seen." I said.

"Believe me, I know." He smiled back at me. "I've been fighting with it for a hundred years. That's why I cut it so short, it's easier to maintain. When it's longer… I mean, I may as well just shave my head and put a bird's nest in its place."

I laughed, then stood and stretched. I saw his eyes drop to my stomach, as my skin was revealed where my pajamas had slipped up. "I'm going to go brush my teeth." I said.

When I looked at myself in the mirror, I was almost surprised that my face hadn't aged. I washed my skin and brushed my teeth, pulling my hair back into a loose ponytail and drinking a glass of water. When I returned to my bedroom, Edward was dressed. "Happy birthday! See you later," he said with a smile, before ducking out my window.

I dressed after he left, unable to feel unhappy about my life. I was a year older than Edward, but what did that matter? Esme was 27 when she was turned, and Carlisle only 24. No one questioned their marriage. Rosalie had been turned at 22 and Emmett was only 20, and people didn't even seem to notice. It wasn't the worst thing in the world, to look a little older than Edward.

What really worried me was that, on my 40th birthday, Edward would still look 17. People would see us together and think I was his mother – or worse, think I was some sort of cradle robber. It didn't matter that Edward was really older than most people's grandfathers. People judge on appearance. And I knew that people's judgments would wear on Edward, too, having to listen to their harsh thoughts whenever he was around them. But Edward wasn't thinking in the long-term, in spite of his 'age and wisdom', as he liked to say. He was able to acknowledge that I would age on an intellectual level, but I don't think he really accepted that it would happen. I just hoped he would change his mind soon enough that people wouldn't notice that I was aging and he wasn't.

My dad was in good spirits, when I went downstairs. He hugged me the second he saw me, said "Happy birthday, Bells!" and then guided me toward the kitchen table, which had a small stack of wrapped gifts sitting on it. I felt overwhelmed that he'd bought me more than one gift. He didn't exactly have a lot of extra money for presents, but this was the first year I'd spent with him over my birthday. At least, the first since the day I was actually born.

He set a plate of pancakes and bacon in front of me, sitting to eat his portion of the large meal at the same table. He didn't talk much during breakfast – he never talked much, really – but I knew that he'd made this meal for me. Normally I made myself some cereal or ate a granola bar and a piece of fruit, and often my father was gone before I got up. He was Chief Charlie Swan of the Forks police department, and his responsibilities as the chief of police included very long hours of work.

After I'd finished breakfast and thanked him for making it, I looked to the pile of presents. I was overwhelmed with gratitude, for a moment, and grinned at him.

"I can't believe you got me gifts," I said.

"I always get you a gift!" Dad protested. He didn't look like me, the way my mother did; he had a strong, heavy jaw and dark curly hair. But we were more alike in personality, something that sometimes caused us to argue. We were both very stubborn. The love, though, made up for that.

"I know, but… this is a lot." I said. "Thank you."

He was embarrassed by my thanks, so he gestured toward the pile. "You'd better start opening them, or you'll be late for school."

The first three gifts were books. Dad knew that I liked to read, but it was clear he wasn't entirely certain what type of books I enjoyed. He gave me three novels where the characters were stranded in the wilderness. 'Hatchet', 'The Cay', and 'Lord of the Flies'. They might be good, but I had never read something before that had to do with wilderness survival. I thanked him anyway, because it was a sweet thought. Maybe by next year, he would know my reading tastes better.

It shocked me to realize, suddenly, that I was planning to be here next year. Of course I was, though. Edward lived here.

The next two gifts were DVDs. One of them was Romeo and Juliet, the version from the nineties with Leonardo DiCaprio. It was a surprisingly astute decision on my dad's part, I loved that movie. I loved the play, in general, but this particular adaptation was more endearing to me than any other of the film versions that I'd seen.

The second film was Ghost Busters, a movie that I had watched with my dad almost every year when we vacationed together in Forks and California. I'd seen it for the first time with him, and he'd bought it on VHS because of how much I liked it the first time – when I was five. Now it was tradition, but the old tape player he owned had finally stopped working. I smiled when I saw the cover of the DVD, and looked up at him with delight.

"You know we're watching this, this weekend, right?" I said.

"Of course." My dad said. He smiled. "Open the last one!"

I turned to the final gift, a heavy, square package. I tore the paper off to see a plastic box with clips holding it closed. Confused, I unclipped the box and lifted the lid. Inside the hard case was foam lining that cushioned a gun.

A gun?

"It's a Smith & Wesson," my dad said. "A three inch 29."

"You bought me a gun..?" I asked.

"You're an adult, now. I taught you how to shoot; I know you have good aim and a good sense about you. It's important to me that you can protect yourself if you need to."

"You want me to carry it around with me?" I asked.

"Well, not at school!" He said. "Use your best judgment. I think you need to have a weapon. I don't want you to be afraid, when you go out. You know how to defend yourself, and you should have the tools to do it."

I gave him another smile. I was puzzled, but also pleased with his decision. He wanted to keep me safe, that much was obvious. But it was so different from what I could have expected from my mother. She was against firearms at all costs, even though I was a good shot. It really illustrated the differences between the two of them, the different ways they looked at the world. Yet Charlie's viewpoint – that I should be ready to fight – had protected me from a couple of drunk men in Port Angeles and had given me the drive to strike James, a tracker vampire who was trying to kill me. I'd begun to come around to his way of thinking.

Maybe the average person didn't need to be ready for attack… but I did. I surrounded myself with vampires, and most of the others in their breed were extremely dangerous. And I had terrible luck, it seemed. Aside from meeting Edward, most of my chance encounters had ended up being violent. It was probably a good idea to have a weapon I could use, if I had to.

"Thanks, dad." I said at last. "After school, I'll try some target practice." I smiled at him.

He smiled back, clapping me on the shoulder. "I'd better get to work," he said after a moment. "I love you, Bells. Drive safe."

Ever since I'd been injured by James the previous spring – something that my mother and Edward had staged into looking like a car crash – my dad had ended any goodbye with 'drive safe'. I understood his worry, even if it wasn't the true nature of my experience. I nodded, and he left.

When I was ready, I got in my truck. I couldn't feel much but anticipation – even though I'd just seen Edward an hour ago – until I pulled into the familiar parking lot behind Forks High School. I spotted Edward leaning motionlessly against his polished silver Volvo, like a tribute to some forgotten god of beauty. He was waiting for me.

Even after half a year with him, I still couldn't believe that I deserved this degree of good fortune. His sister, Alice, stood waiting for me next to him.

Edward and Alice weren't really related. In Forks, the community believed all the children were adopted – which wasn't exactly false – except that Rosalie and Jasper were twins. In reality, Rosalie was Jasper's third cousin; the great grandchild of his cousin Alec. It sounded impossible, until one realized that Jasper was born in 1759 in the British colony of Maryland, fought in the American Revolution, and had a cousin that ended up being Rosalie's grandparent when she was born in 1803. With those facts in mind, the details of their relationship no longer seemed important.

Although none of the Cullen children were true siblings, they had skin of precisely the same color. Most of them had the same, golden-amber colored eyes. Most of them had the same deep bruise-like shadows beneath the eyes. They were all shockingly beautiful.

Edward was different, now. Though his eyes had taken on the deep burgundy of vampires that fed from humans, he was wearing color contact lenses that masked the tint from the wider world, making them look a flat brown that was a thin mockery of his normal eye color. Not all the changes in him were bad, however. The nights he'd spent in my bed, asleep, had removed much of the dark shadows that he'd habitually worn, before. He looked healthier than the others, and I was certain it was because of me and the strange gift I had, that could draw him into sleep when he was unable to achieve it by himself.

As I slammed the door of my '53 Chevy truck, I noticed Alice was holding something. I frowned vaguely at the small, silver-wrapped gift in her hands. I had asked the Cullens not to give me anything for my birthday, even Edward. They had so much money that I couldn't imagine the extravagant things they would get, it seemed to mean so little to them.

"Happy birthday, Bella!" Alice said, skipping toward me, her pixie's face glowing under her spiky hair.

"Thanks," I said softly, and Edward could see my reluctance. He tried to hide his smile, but I knew his face well enough to see it. I gave him a disapproving look.

"Do you want to open your present now or later?" she asked eagerly as we made our way to where Edward still waited.

"I asked you not to get me anything, Alice…" I said.

She shrugged. "Later, then!" She said, missing my point entirely.

We reached Edward, and he held out his hand for mine. I took it easily, falling quickly into the comfort of his presence. My mood quickly improved. His skin was, as always, smooth and cool. He gave my fingers a gentle squeeze, and I smiled up at him.

"Most people seem to enjoy things like birthdays and gifts," he commented, running his hand through his tousled bronze hair.

Alice laughed, a silvery chime that was unique to her. "Of course you'll enjoy it!" She said as we walked toward the school. "Everyone is supposed to be nice to you today and give you your way, Bella. What's the worst that could happen?"

"Getting older." I said, giving a pointed look at Edward. His smile faded, eyebrows drawing together. He was troubled by the idea of turning me into what he was, and any time I brought up the practical nature of it and my right to choose my fate, he withdrew into himself. As soon as I saw the look on his face, I felt bad about what I'd said.

"Eighteen isn't very old," Alice said.

"Older than Edward."

Edward sighed, and Alice laughed again. "Sorry, Bella, but whatever you say… you're not older than Edward. And I have the photos to prove it." She grinned wickedly at Edward, who rolled his eyes.

We arrived at the cafeteria, where I knew Alice would separate from us as Edward and I went to our first hour class. We had almost all the same classes this year, something we had meticulously scheduled in order to spend more time with each other.

"What time will you be at the house?" Alice asked.

"The house?"

"Oh, come on, Bella! Don't ruin all our fun!" She was clearly planning a party. I frowned.

"I have work," I said.

"Actually, I called and asked Mrs. Newton to switch shifts with you. She said to tell you 'happy birthday'."

I frowned again. "You've gone to an awful lot of trouble for this, haven't you?" I asked.

"Yep! All for you. And everyone will just be so disappointed… I guess I can tell them you don't want to see them…" she trailed off, her tone heavy. I knew she would do no such thing, but somehow she made me feel guilty even so.

"Oh, fine." I conceded. Alice grinned and pecked me on the cheek, turning and gliding off toward her first class.

Edward smiled at me. "We'd better go, before we're late for class."

…..

We sat at our usual table for lunch. In the previous year, before all the horrifying events in which I left Forks and killed a vampire that was hunting me, Edward and I had begun to share our time between his usual table and the table I'd sat at with my friends before we started dating. They'd never quite warmed up to Edward, who was quiet at their table and had deliberately avoided his classmates before he'd met me.

This year, it was a little different. Although they were not quite at ease around the Cullens, Edward and Alice were the only two still in school. The "older" Cullen siblings had graduated, and as a result the two that remained did not seem quite so intimidating. Alice had joined me and Edward with my other friends, and a strange kind of truce existed between the group. Mike and Jessica (who were in the awkward post-breakup friendship phase) and Angela and Ben (who had started dating over the summer), Eric, Conner, Tyler and Lauren (who didn't like me) all sat with us every day.

The normal students had trouble including Edward in their conversations, partly because of the strange emotional shift that most humans experienced in the presence of vampires (that I was remarkably immune to), and partly because he had made his disinterest in them clear for the last three years. And, to be honest, Edward had some social awkwardness from spending so many years alone. It didn't help that he could hear their thoughts whether he liked it or not, and in such close proximity it was very difficult for him to block out their internal judgments of his behavior.

Alice was another story. Her personality overcame the fact that people felt ill at ease in the Cullens presence, and she often participated enthusiastically with the conversations they had. She never seemed to stop being amazed and delighted by people. She had been born in 1850 and turned into a vampire in 1869, perpetually 19 years old. And much of her second life had been spent in high school and college, around other young adults.

I couldn't imagine that they could tell her many stories that she hadn't heard already. She had to have heard every prank story, every sneaking-out-of-the-house story, every run-in-with-the-police story, and every teen romance story there was. But her vast experience with the world of young people didn't appear to damper her interest at all. She laughed at their jokes, asked for details of their narrow escapes from parental justice, and showed all the appropriate remorse when so-and-so broke up with you-know-who. The other students loved her in spite of their discomfort, which they seemed to attribute to Edward's proximity rather than Alice.

But Edward didn't mind the mild ostracism the way I'd thought he might. He was used to it, I guess, though I didn't know how anyone could get accustomed to being completely aware of someone's instinctive dislike of them. But sometimes it bothered Edward how very comfortable I was with being close to him. He felt it illustrated a lack of self-preservation. Vampires just didn't affect me the way they affected others.

Alice had let it slip that it was my birthday, and my friends immediately started asking whether I would be having a party. Edward shot a warning glance to Alice and I knew what he was thinking. There was no way we could have a lot of humans in the Cullen house without causing trouble. The party was for me and only me.

"I'm not having a party," I said.

"What? Why not?" Jess demanded.

"Come on, I hate birthday parties." I said with a wave of my hand.

"You wouldn't hate a party I threw, brown eyes." Mike grinned at me. I could see Jessica's annoyed glance at him – it was too early after their breakup for him to be flirting with me.

"I don't know, Mike," Eric commented. "Remember the last party you threw?"

"Didn't the police arrest some of your friends for driving on Mr. Berty's lawn?" Alice asked in her melodic voice. The others laughed, and the conversation was diverted from my birthday to Mike's bad luck with parties. Or good luck, depending on how you judged success. Mike's partygoers often found themselves in unfortunate situations, but his parties usually went down as legendary in the minds of his peers. And what kind of party was it if it didn't leave behind a good story to tell?

…..

Edward left me at my house at 3 pm, so that I could get ready for the party in private. The past few weeks especially, he had been a little more distant than when we'd first started dating. It was one of the reasons I had gotten a job (though I certainly did need the gas money), but over the summer he gave me a bit of space. We spent almost every night together, but most of the days I didn't know what he was up to. I assumed he was hunting, trying to quell the thirst. But I was starting to think perhaps he felt guilty about what had happened to me, as if it were his fault that I had been put in danger's way. It was as if he wanted me to decide he wasn't right for me.

But I had no plans to do that. I loved Edward, and I wanted to spend my life with him.

Edward was back in my driveway at 7, ready to accompany me to his house. My mother had sent me a camera for my birthday, so I had Edward drive as I tried my new toy out. Edward pulled faces at me in the car as I snapped pictures of him. Even when he was crossing his eyes or puffing his cheeks, it was impossible for him to hide how handsome he really was.

"And these pictures, you'll show up in them?" I asked.

He laughed as we pulled into his driveway. I took the camera with me, getting out of the car and walking toward the front door. He was still laughing as he opened the door for me.

The Cullen family was waiting in the huge white living room; when I walked through the door, they greeted me with a loud chorus of "Happy birthday, Bella!"

I assumed it was Alice that had covered every flat surface with pink candles and roses. There was a table with a white cloth draped over it next to Edward's piano (he had displayed his musical talents for me many times over the summer, and I never got tired of listening to him play), which held a pink birthday cake and a small pile of silver-wrapped presents.

It was so much more than I had imagined.

Edward's adopted parents, Carlisle and Esme – as impossibly lovely as ever – were the closest to the door. Esme drew a finger across my forehead, brushing my hair out of my face and pressed a light kiss to my forehead. Her soft, caramel-colored hair brushed my cheek as she leaned back and gave me a loving, maternal look. Carlisle placed a cool hand against my shoulder, smiling at me under his wavy blond hair. He was younger than Esme by several thousand years, but somehow they were able to connect and love each other in spite of that difference. It made me hopeful about my relationship with Edward.

"Sorry about the extravagance, Bella," Carlisle stage-whispered. "Alice is a force that can't be stopped."

Rosalie and Emmett stood behind them. Rosalie gave me a tentative smile, her long blonde hair pouring over her shoulders. I had forgotten how stunning she was – it almost hurt to look at her. Emmett, her husband, was stretched into a huge grin next to her. I certainly didn't remember him being so big! They had gone to Africa on vacation, but neither had returned looking any more tan, something that didn't surprise me at all. Vampires didn't tan.

"You haven't changed at all, short-stack," Emmett said. "I thought there might be a difference! A superhero outfit at the least, I mean, you killed your first villain and everything."

I flushed, looking down. I didn't know how I felt about what I had done to James. He had been trying to kill me, so I had acted out of self-defense (and defense of my mother, who he had kidnapped). But I also knew that his breed of vampire had very little free will; once they locked onto a victim, they could not stop until that victim was dead. Edward could have turned me into a vampire, but had chosen instead to doom James. I understood his point… James would have only gone onto the next victim, had he survived. But it was still hard for me to know I ended another creature's life, even one as horrible as James had been.

Emmett had a way of being shockingly flippant about things that tended to upset others. He was very frank and had little tact, but his swagger and buoyant cheerfulness seemed to improve the mood of the people around him.

"I don't think superhero outfits can exist outside of the 80's," I said. "At least, not in the wild. Not without being extremely conspicuous."

Laughter rumbled through the room. Although none of the people standing in the house looked old enough to actually remember the eighties, all of them except for me had lived through them. I was sure they had a lot to say about the things they'd seen people wear, but even I knew that the age of brightly colored spandex was over.

"I have to step out for a second," Emmett said, then, pausing to wink at Alice. "Try not to do anything exciting and adventurous while I'm gone, I'd hate to miss it again."

"I'll try to restrain myself," I said.

Alice let go of Jasper's hand and skipped forward, all her teeth sparkling in the bright light. Jasper smiled too, but kept his distance. He leaned, long and dignified, against the post at the foot of the stairs. Like Edward, he had started to grow his hair out over the summer and it was beginning to wave gently. It looked like it was the same texture as Carlisle's, though it rang with a deeper golden tone than Carlisle's more buttery tint, and since it was now much longer it gave him a regal look. During the days we'd spent cooped up together in Phoenix, we'd gotten to know each other better, but he still kept his distance. He had more trouble than the rest did in sticking to the Cullens' diet; the scent of human blood was much harder for him to resist.

"Time to open presents," Alice declared. She put her hand under my elbow and towed me to the table.

"Let me take pictures of you all, first!" I said. Emmett had returned to the room, and they were polite enough to pose for me several times. I think Alice was somewhat annoyed at the delay, but I was happy to prolong the wait before I had to see the money they'd spent on me.

I'd never had much money, and that had never bothered me. My mother, Renee, had raised me on a kindergarten teacher's salary. My dad, Charlie, wasn't getting rich at his job, either – he was the police chief here in the tiny town of Forks. My personal money came from the three days a week I worked at the local sporting good's store, which belonged to my friend Mike's parents. In a town this small, I was lucky to have a job. Every penny I made went into my microscopic college fund, or toward gas for my car.

Edward's family had a _lot_ of money – I didn't even want to think about how much. Carlisle had survived both of his parents, was an only child, and had kept his family money after being changed by Esme. And Alice had an uncanny ability to predict stock market trends, due to her rare gift of premonitions. They had an unlimited amount of time to let their interest build, and at this point they were so wealthy that money meant almost nothing to them.

I knew that such wealth had taken time to adjust to, at least for Edward. We'd talked about money before, and he'd discussed his own reaction to being changed and suddenly having funds for anything he might want to buy. He had grown up comfortable, at least when he was a young child, before his mother's job at the Everleigh Club had been terminated when the club closed in 1911. But she had made and saved enough to keep him clothed and in school, and with enough to have nice Christmases and birthdays, piano lessons and baseball equipment. It was closer to how I had grown up than any of the others.

Esme, the oldest and the one who'd turned Carlisle, had grown up in the Bronze Age in Wales. She had been a member of the culture that had built Stonehenge (and something on the English coast that Edward had referred to as 'Seahenge'). Her people had not used money the way we did. She had grown up with trade and bartering, and small communities linked together for the goal of mutual survival. Money meant little to her, but it was for a different reason than the rest of them – it just wasn't something she thought about. She handled money only when absolutely necessary, and had no patience for what she called 'tokens', which she firmly believed had 'false value'. It wasn't that difficult to see where she was coming from.

Jasper had grown up in a farming family in Maryland, and had fought in the Revolutionary War. He and his twin brother had been captured by the British and he'd given over rebel secrets to save his brother's life. He'd been recaptured by his own men, tortured, and left to die. Because his brother reported him dead, he was unable to claim anything he would normally have inherited as the oldest son.

Not that there had been much he could use now. As a farming family, they had grown up with enough to eat and all the necessities of life, but little extra. This was compounded by the fact that in addition to Jasper and his twin brother Arthur, he had two younger siblings, and his family also supported his elderly grandfather and his widowed aunt and her son. The common niceties that the well-off enjoyed were rarer to the Whitlock family, who only occasionally had money to spare for things other than everyday life. Even now, I could tell he didn't think of himself as part of the upper class. For him, it was more like winning the lottery – yes, he was rich, but he was entirely outside of the culture of the very wealthy.

Edward told me that Rosalie had been born to an affluent family in 1803, but he didn't think it was his place to share her story without her permission. All he would tell me was that she was the youngest daughter in a family of seven, and that she was married shortly before her death, removing her from any of the money she might have inherited. She seemed the most comfortable with the money the Cullens had for her.

Emmett had also been born into a wealthy family, in 1836, but had five older brothers. Edward said Emmett had felt that they had done all that could be done by a young man in Tennessee, and rather than follow in their footsteps, he had sought adventure and gold out west. At fourteen he'd gotten onto a covered wagon with a few other single men and run away from home. Unfortunately, he had been unable to find any gold and had turned instead to robbing people and general lawlessness. He died on his twentieth birthday, after a lifetime outside the law and having cut all ties with his family. However well-off he may have grown up, there was no way for him to access that money after his death, and he'd lived his adult life on a shoestring, robbing just enough to get women and liquor and, when he had a little extra cash, food.

And Alice… poor Alice. She didn't even remember her human life, but her research had revealed that she was institutionalized on the same date that her parents had reported her dead. There was nothing about the story that made me want to know more; the bare bones of her history was depressing enough on its own.

But I couldn't believe that it was easy for any of them to suddenly step into a life of limitless funds, especially the ones who had lived by the penny, like Jasper and (eventually), Emmett. It just didn't seem to bother them, anymore. They could no longer understand why it made me uncomfortable when they spent money on me. I didn't like it when Edward took me to an expensive restaurant in Seattle, and I had forbidden him from giving me a new car or paying for my college tuition. He thought I was being more difficult than necessary, but as the youngest in his family, he was closest to the sentiments of human life. He was able to understand where I was coming from, at least.

That didn't mean that he could stop his family from spending on me, though.

So I took photos. It was procrastination, but I didn't mind that. It was fun to see them goof around like normal people, making faces and giving each other bunny ears in the photographs. I really hoped Edward's laughter had been an indicator that the idea of vampires not showing up on film was myth, like the idea of them not being seen in mirrors. It would be disappointing if all my photos turned out to be of an empty room.

"Presents, presents!" Alice insisted, clapping her hands together.

"I told you I didn't want anything…" I began.

"I didn't listen." She said defiantly. "Open it!" She took the camera from my hands and replaced it with a large silver box.

It was so light that it felt empty. The tag on top said it was from Emmett, Rosalie, and Jasper. Uncomfortably aware of their eyes on me, I tore the paper off and stared at the box it concealed. It was something electrical, with lots of numbers in the name. I opened the box, expecting to find understanding there.

It _was_ empty. It was an empty box, wrapped in silver paper.

"It's just what I asked for." I said, though my confused eyes rose up to the three the gift was meant to be from. Even Rosalie cracked a smile, and I heard Jasper laugh. Jasper laughed so rarely that each time it was amazing that someone could have such a lovely voice, even when the sound being made was involuntary.

"It's a stereo for your truck," Emmett explained with a grin. "I just went and installed it so you can't return it."

I shook my head disapprovingly, though I couldn't prevent the smile of gratitude. It was a nice gift, a thoughtful one; even though I knew it must have cost a lot. "Thanks, guys."

"Open mine and Edward's next!" Alice said, so excited her voice seemed to trill. She held a small, flat square in her hands. I lifted my eyebrow at Edward.

"You promised.

"I didn't spend a dime," Edward assured me.

I took the light package, stuck my finger under the edge of the paper and tried to tear the tape with a short jerk of my hand.

It all happened very quickly, then.

Edward and Jasper were suddenly fighting, sprawled across the floor. My heart pounded at the sound of it, so like a couple of dangerous animals fighting. The rip of their snarls rang in my ears, the harsh crash of their fists slamming into each other filling my mind. I could see their razor-sharp teeth coming very close to each other's skin - snapping shut with millimeters to spare - and they were clearly evenly matched.

I didn't even realize I was bleeding until I looked down and saw the cut from the tape, which had opened my finger widely across the knuckle. In an instant I understood what was happening. Adrenaline surged as their swings and teeth came close to actually hitting me.

Rosalie pushed me behind her, trying to protect me from the viciousness of the fight. The boys were fighting as if to kill each other and my flesh was much more vulnerable to their weapons than any of the vampires were. My shock was such that I didn't even notice that the force of her thrust had knocked me against the table holding the cake, at least not at first. When I felt the searing pain, I looked away from the fight for the first time. When I'd arrived, I hadn't seen the knife. A knife to cut the cake. I was the only one who could eat it, so I had given little attention to the décor on the table.

I saw it now.

The cake knife had sliced into my arm, cutting broadly from my elbow to my shoulder.

I knew Rosalie hadn't meant to hurt me, she had acted in a moment of urgency. The cut wasn't even as bad as some I'd had in the past, but it began to bleed immediately. Heavily. Jasper surged in my direction, almost breaking free of Edward's grasp. Edward thrust him backward, though the wild look he threw in my direction gave me an overpowering rush of fear. Fear I wasn't accustomed to.

He turned his face away from me, and it looked like it took tremendous effort to do. The snarling and ripping sounds increased, and I was clutching my arm, feeling my heartbeat in the wound and quickly getting dazed.

Then Carlisle's gentle hands were on me, guiding me into the kitchen. I heard loud orders from Emmett and Esme in the other room, getting the fighting brothers out of the house, away from the smell of my blood. Away from the temptation to kill me. Edward had fought Jasper's urge to kill me.

But Edward had wanted to kill me, too.


	2. Chapter 2: Stitches

**2. STITCHES**

"Bella," Carlisle's voice was soft and comforting. The British accent made him seem somehow courtly and respectful, even though I knew nationality had nothing to do with that. Too many movies. I focused and look toward him as he continued to speak. "Do you want me to drive you to the hospital, or would you like me to take care of it here?"

"Here, please." I said. I didn't want the whole town talking about this, which I knew would happen if I showed up at the hospital.

Alice appeared with Carlisle's bag. I hadn't noticed him ask her to fetch it, but I supposed with her supernatural hearing, it wasn't too surprising. Carlisle kept the pressure steady on my arm.

"How are you feeling?" Carlisle asked. "Dizzy, nauseated?"

"I'm fine." Physically, I would be. But Edward's expression had truly scared me. I didn't know how long it would take to recover that.

There was a sharp sting, and then a numb, dead feeling spread throughout my arm. I watched Carlisle's face carefully to distract me from what his hands were doing. His hair gleamed in the bright light as he bent over my arm. There was no pain now, just a gentle tugging sensation that I tried to ignore. I watched Alice give me an apologetic smile before she excused herself from the room.

"I guess I can clear a room," I said.

"It's not your fault," Carlisle said, the hint of a chuckle in his voice. "It could happen to anyone."

"Funny how it keeps on happening to me, though."

He laughed again. "You just notice it more because of the situation. I'm sure that, out in the world, there are a dozen other kids your age getting cut on poorly placed knives. Unlike you, they won't take anything from it but the knowledge that knives are sharp."

"That's not at all comforting." I said.

He smiled at me, glancing back down to his work.

"How can you do this?" I asked. "Even Alice… _Esme_…" I trailed off. Though the rest of them had given up on the traditional vampire diet just as absolutely as Carlisle had, he was the only one who could bear the smell of my blood without wanting to destroy me then and there. It was obviously more difficult than he made it seem.

"Years and years of practice." He said.

"Would it be harder if you took a break from the hospital? If you weren't around blood for a long time?"

He smiled again. "We're always around blood, Bella." He said. "There's not even such a difference in scent when someone is injured and bleeding, unless they are mortally wounded. It's the sight of it that pushes the others over the edge. But the sight doesn't bother me, for some reason. Anyway, I wouldn't want to take an extended holiday. I like my work too much."

"What is it that you enjoy?" It seemed masochistic.

"I enjoy saving people, Bella." He said. "My abilities are… unique in my field. They let me save people that would otherwise be lost. It makes me feel more worthwhile to know that –not in spite of what I am, but because of it – someone's life is better."

I mulled that over as he continued cleaning the wound. He rummaged in his bag for new tools, and I tried not to picture a needle and thread.

"You try very hard to make up for something that was never your fault," I said as a new kind of tugging started at the edges of my skin. "It's not like you asked for this. You didn't choose it. But you have to work so hard to be good…"

"I don't know that I'm making up for anything," he disagreed lightly. "At first, I felt very betrayed by the world. But I have come to understand that life… it's learning. And I continue learning every day. I am every bit as alive as I ever was. And, just like the mortal part of my life, it comes down to deciding what to do with what I have been given."

"You make it sound easy."

He examined my arm again. "There," he snipped a thread. "All done. Let me bandage it for you." He cleaned it again with some syrup-colored liquid, which stained my skin.

"In the beginning, though." I pressed as he got into his bag for gauze. "Why did you even think to try a different way than the natural one?"

He gave me a small smile. "Hasn't Edward told you this story?"

"Parts of it. But I want to know what you were thinking…"

He gave me a long, serious look. I could tell he was wondering if I was trying to assess what I would be thinking, if I were eventually turned into one of the Cullens.

"You know my father was a clergyman," he said. He continued moving, and the smell of alcohol burned my nose. "We didn't see completely eye-to-eye. I have always been very spiritual, very religious. I suppose that's the one good thing my father gave to me. See, my mother died shortly after my birth, and my father raised me himself. But he was a hard man. Strong, but hard. He didn't know how to treat a child. And that lack of compassion and gentleness was evident in his other pursuits, also."

He dumped the wet gauze and bloody cleaning pads into a glass bowl. I didn't understand what he was doing until he dumped some of the rubbing alcohol over the whole mess, and set it on fire. Destroying the scent of my blood.

"For many people, religion teaches them the value of life. Of humanity. And in some regards, I think that is what my father meant to do. But he failed at it. Instead, he put into people a fear of each other, a fear of any sort of vice or sin. It is not our place to judge the sins of others, but when we are afraid that it is a contagious thing… we do. And he caused many people, myself included, to not only judge those that were different from us, but to actively try to hurt them. The things we did…"

His eyebrows drew together, and he began to wrap my wound.

"I was still young when I became involved, fourteen. At the time, I thought myself a man, but now I know with sureness that I was nowhere close. I followed my father like a puppy, desperate for his approval, which I never received. After his death, I allowed my doubts to come into my heart more fully. I suppose I believed more in the power and goodness of God than the abilities of the devil. I did not truly believe that God would allow vile creatures to overcome all of humanity, even if the devil attempted such. At the time of my death, I was still in the process of working through those feelings." He shrugged, taping the gauze closed and sitting back on his heels, looking at me directly.

"It may sound awful to you, but I have forgiven myself for the things I did as a young man. The crimes I committed were terrible, truly. But I think we must all forgive ourselves for what we do, or our lives become devoid of meaning. If we forgive ourselves, and work to become better, we can introduce good things. They will not negate our sins, but they are valuable nonetheless. To forever dwell on our transgressions makes us useless."

I wet my lips, touching the bandage on my arm. The wound was still numb, but I was comforted by the fact that the bandage felt secure.

"But… feeding from animals… how did you think of it?"

"Wouldn't you?" He asked, smiling again. "It's not such a stretch. I thought it was worth trying, to see if it was possible. I admit that, when I was first changed, I believed I was damned. Even now I find myself consumed with that same doubt at times. Edward certainly didn't tell you, but I tried to end my existence in every way I knew how, when I was first transformed. None of them worked. It is difficult for us to end our own suffering… even with fire, our particular breed of vampire is difficult to kill. If we are too mobile, the fire won't engulf us properly, and there is something to be said for instinct. Really, the only way for us to die is to provoke the Volturi, in Italy… they have very strict codes of conduct within their city. But I didn't know that, then. And by the time I met them, I had come past those self-destructive feelings."

"The Volturi…" I said.

"But as far as my feeding was concerned… I could not bring myself to kill a human. I was overcome with the guilt of my last actions as a living man. The entire group I had taken with me to capture what I believed to be werewolves had been slaughtered before my very eyes. On top of that, the cold horror of realizing that the men and women and _children_ we had accused in the past were _not_ the same as the beasts we encountered. They were innocent, and we had hurt them – _killed_ them." His voice broke and his eyes turned away from me. There was a long silence before he spoke again. "My last living thoughts were of regret. Self-disgust… utter, whole, overwhelming regret."

"But I thought that new vampires had an uncontrollable thirst," I said.

"It's true," he agreed. "The thirst of a newborn is indescribable. But I couldn't allow myself to succumb to it. I hated what I had been in life, and I took my change as a chance to change who I was. To discard all I had been before. A complete rebirth is impossible, but I made the choice not to harm another human being. And as luck had it, we can be sustained by animals. I have managed, somehow, to keep from drinking human blood, even after all this time."

"It's amazing." I said. "None of the others…"

"I do not judge them for what they do," Carlisle added. "I suppose I should be more strict with it. Any human life taken by us is taken in sin. But… after judging others for all my life, I can't pretend to have the answers now. And I love them just the same. So I try my best to help them, to keep them pure, but I do not condemn them when they slip. Our very nature goes against the lifestyle we have built."

Religion wasn't something I knew how to address. Edward had some religious belief, though it was not quite as fervent as the way Carlisle spoke of God and sin. My father considered himself a Lutheran, because that's what his parents had been, but Sundays were spent by the river with a fishing pole, not in church. My mother had tried more religions than I could count, but she moved on so quickly that I doubted she understood any one of them very well. She had never liked rules much, and every religion seemed to have _some_ rules.

"I'm sure this sounds bizarre, coming from a vampire," he grinned. "Foolish, even. But I believe there is still a point to this life, even for us. I have never seen anything to make me doubt whether God exists in some form or another. Not even my face in the mirror. By many accounts, we are damned regardless, but… if God can forgive the sins of man, which can be just as egregious as our own, surely he can forgive us also. And if not… well, maybe we will get a little credit for trying."

"I don't think it's foolish." I said. "Like you said, what vampires do is no worse than what humans do. Really, it might even be a different standard to live by. Hunger is a basic drive of survival, I mean… even if God actually told every human being on the earth that eating food was a sin, how many would be able to resist?"

"Aside from Buddhist Monks, you mean?" Carlisle said, but I could see his smile. "You know, you're the first to say it isn't foolish."

"The rest of them don't feel the same?" I thought of one person in particular.

Carlisle seemed to guess who I thought of. "Edward's with me to a certain point. But he doesn't believe that our second life counts toward anything. He believes that by being turned, we forfeit our soul. When we are destroyed, he thinks there is no afterlife for us."

Something in my expression must have clued Carlisle in to my sudden thoughts of Edward's reluctance to turn me.

"I look at my… my son. He is my son now. His strength, his desire to do good, the love he has to give… and I wonder, how could there not be more for Edward? But if I believed as he does… if you believed as he did. Could you take away his soul?"

I said nothing. I didn't know how to respond.

"You see the problem, then."

"It should be my choice," I said.

"It's his choice, too." He said. "Whether or not he is the one responsible."

"He's not the only one able to do it."

He laughed abruptly. "Oh, no." He said. "Don't think you'll convince me to get involved, Bella! This is between the two of you. If any one of us chose to change you against Edward's will, there would be hell to pay."

I frowned as Edward walked into the room. "I'll take you home soon." His face was smooth, unreadable. There was something in his eyes he was trying very hard to hide. I felt a spasm of anxiety.

"Carlisle can take me, if…"

"I'm fine." Edward said. "You'll need to change, anyway. Your dad would have a heart attack with all that blood on your shirt. I'll have Alice find you something." He strode out of the kitchen.

"He's very upset." I said, looking back to Carlisle with worry.

"Yes." He said. "Tonight is exactly the kind of thing he fears the most. You being put in danger because of what we are."

"It's not his fault."

"It's not yours, either."

…..

Alice had made me take all the gifts with me when I left. "You can thank me later, when you've opened them." She'd said.

Edward was silent as we got into my car. On the dashboard was a big red ribbon, stuck to the new stereo. I left it where it was. We wouldn't be listening to the radio tonight, I knew.

He didn't look at me or the stereo. I drove too fast, the silence making me tense.

"Say something," I finally begged as I turned onto the freeway.

"What do you want me to say?"

I frowned. He wasn't usually so remote, at least not anymore. It was like we'd just met all over again.

"Tell me you forgive me."

That brought a flicker of life to his face – a flicker of anger. "Forgive you? For _what_?"

"I should have – been more careful, what happened…"

"You gave yourself a papercut." He said with a heavy voice.

"Still, I feel like… I mean, it was my fault, if I hadn't – "

"_Your_ fault? If you'd cut yourself at anyone else's house – ! If _Mike Newton_ had thrown you a party, with Jessica and Angela and all your other normal friends, what would have happened? What's the _worst_ that could have happened? They couldn't find you a bandage, maybe? Nothing! Nothing at all! Don't try to take this on yourself, Bella, you'll only make me feel more disgusted with myself!"

I took a deep breath. "I'm not talking about Mike," I said. "I'm talking about us. I know what you are, and your family. I should have been more careful."

"No," Edward said. "No, Bella."

I was used to knowing what to say to Edward. Knowing how to bridge the awkwardness, whenever we had a minor disagreement. But this felt like more. He was acting as if his very existence was incompatible with mine, and I didn't know how to bridge that large of a gap.

"Will you stay tonight?" I asked.

"I should go home." He said. "I need to make sure – make sure Jasper's okay."

I felt that he was on the edge of saying something more, but he didn't. And I couldn't deny him the time with his brother, even though I knew from the look he'd given me that he had wanted to feed from me almost as badly as poor Jasper.

He got out of my car as soon as we arrived at my house. "Happy birthday." He said. He leaned over and kissed me chastely. He pulled away quickly, though his hand lingered at my chin. His face was troubled. "I'm sorry about tonight. Really, I am. I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay."

When I got into my room, and into my pajamas, I set to opening the remaining gifts. The first box was one I truly wished Edward had stayed for me to open. It appeared to be from Carlisle and Esme, but was for me and Edward both. Tickets. We were going to be flying to Jacksonville.

My mother would be so excited, but I didn't email her about it yet. I didn't want to talk about the party, and I'd already called to thank her for the camera.

The next gift was the flat square, the one that I'd cut my finger on. It was a CD with no writing on it in a clear jewel case. I put it into the small CD player on my bedside table. I waited for it to play, and then the music began. I felt tears come into my eyes. It was Edward's music, his piano compositions. He'd shared many of them with me over the summer, and my favorite was the one he'd written just for me. My lullaby.

The rest of the gifts paled in comparison, though not much could live up to the gift of Edward's music. A blank scrapbook (I already had plans to put my birthday party photos in it), a new copy of Pride and Prejudice (my old one had fallen apart), a small handbag from Alice (she was still trying to convince me that purses were worth the money) and a tin of loose-leaf tea (Carlisle had been delighted to learn I liked to drink it in the traditional way).

If I were going by gifts, it would have been a good birthday. But the events at the party and Edward's behavior afterward had left the end of the night open. I didn't understand his reaction, and I had trouble falling to sleep, knowing how upset he really was. Eventually I got up and took two cold capsules, drugging myself into sleep. I couldn't stand thinking about my anxieties for another second.


	3. Chapter 3: The End

**3. THE END**

Edward was waiting for me at school, as usual, but his face was still wrong. There was something buried in his eyes that I didn't understand, and it scared me. I didn't want to bring up the party, but I wasn't sure if avoiding the subject would be any better. And, even with the dark tinted lenses, his eyes seemed different somehow. Brighter. I supposed he must have fed after leaving me at home.

"How does your arm feel?" He asked, taking my good hand in his.

"Perfect." I lied.

We walked in silence, him shortening his stride to mine. Alice wasn't there, and so I couldn't ask her how Jasper was. Edward didn't mention her absence, and he remained aloof through the morning. Occasionally he would ask about my arm. I would lie.

I remembered that at one point, I had promised myself that I would never lie to Edward, and he had agreed not to lie to me. I hated myself for breaking that promise, and after only a few months of being together. Was our relationship that fragile? Worse, I felt that he was breaking the same promise to me. Why did this have to happen?

She wasn't at lunch. She usually beat us there, but she was missing today.

"Where's Alice?" I asked Edward.

He looked at a granola bar as he pulverized it between his fingertips. "She's with Jasper."

"Is he okay?"

"He's gone away for a while."

I took a breath. "And Alice, too?"

"Probably." His tone was bitter, which puzzled me. "She was going to come to school today to talk to you, but we had an argument. She didn't want me to come, today. She said – " his voice had become angry, and he stopped himself, shaking his head. "Nothing. She was annoyed, so she didn't come. They've probably already left."

"Where?"

"Denali. She wanted me and Jasper to both go."

Denali was where another band of unique vampires – ones that fed from animals, like the Cullens – lived. I'd heard of them now and again. Edward had gone there when he'd first met me, and the particular scent of my blood – which was more irresistible to Edward than any of the others – had nearly overwhelmed him. It made sense for Alice and Jasper to go there.

But… if they had wanted Edward to go… how badly had he wanted to hurt me? And if he had truly wanted to kill me… why had he refused to go? Why was there an argument between them over it? I would have understood. I wanted to ask, but I felt that I couldn't. The problem was still too new, and Edward's sudden lack of communication unnerved me.

…..

It continued like that for days. I heard nothing from Edward, no matter what I asked him, but I could feel as his emotional state grew more and more unhappy.

I watched, one day, as Edward was confronted by Emmett in the parking lot. I'd arrived early, my sleep disrupted by anxiety. I immediately knew something was going on. Emmett had graduated already, so there was no reason for him to be there, it was clear that he was only there for Edward. They had argued – if not loudly, then animatedly – by Edward's car. Emmett had even shoved Edward roughly backward, and if it had been any harder, Edward's elbow would have broken his passenger side window.

Edward didn't know I saw it. I was on the opposite side of the lot. When Emmett had gone, I put my truck back into drive and pulled into the spot next to Edward, so he wouldn't think I had been spying. I half expected him to ask me why I'd parked twice, clued in by the sound of my engine, but he had been too caught up in his argument with Emmett to notice. I actually saw him replace his look of distress with a blank expression, one I was beginning to hate.

The afternoon of the next day, he had a heated conversation on his phone with someone. I watched his facial expressions wheel from anger to despair and back again as I walked toward him. When he spotted me, he flipped the phone closed immediately, hanging up on the other person. I asked him who it was.

"Nobody." He said.

He wasn't staying over at my house anymore. I asked him every day, but his answer was always the same. "Not tonight, I can't." If I pressed the issue, all he would add was, "Family obligations."

And then, he went missing.

The first day, I called Edward on his cellphone. The second day, I called him at his house. The third day, I called Alice, who told me she was in Alaska and hadn't heard from him. I also called Emmett, who told me he didn't know – he'd had been out of town on a hunting trip. I suspected both of them were lying to me.

On the fourth day, I called Carlisle, who said, "We don't know where he is, either. We'll call you when we know something."

I didn't hear from Edward for a full week. By the end of it, I was panicked. Something had happened. Something had happened to Edward. He had to be hurt somewhere, trapped, or even dead. This wasn't like him. He was responsible, attentive, loving, and gentle, and wonderful. He wasn't someone who just disappeared. Something was very wrong.

I tried desperately to distract myself. I spent a lot of time with my camera, taking photos of everything I could think of. I listened to the CD he'd made me over and over again. And I practiced shooting my new gun at a target my dad had set up in the back yard, using blanks, of course. I even started reading the books Charlie had bought me, which turned out to be more interesting than I had expected.

None of these things really took my mind off Edward, though. I could focus on something else for a few seconds, but before long the gnawing fear returned. I couldn't sleep, even with the cold capsules, and food seemed to have no taste. I chewed my fingernails into ragged stubs.

On the seventh day, Carlisle called me. My heart leapt to my throat as I answered the phone.

"We've found him." He said. "We split into groups to search the area."

I didn't know how large 'the area' was, but it had to have been pretty massive to take them so long to locate Edward. Vampires were fast and efficient.

"Emmett and Rosalie found him. They're quite cross – they were supposed to go on a honeymoon to East Asia," Carlisle tried to lighten the mood, but it didn't work. "Edward's going to come and see you soon. Don't worry, Bella."

I did worry, of course. What had happened? Why hadn't Carlisle told me more? I went three more days without a word from Edward or his family. He never answered my calls.

…..

Then, one afternoon, there he was. He stood in my driveway as I returned from school, looking even more breathtaking than I'd remembered. I parked hurriedly, tearing out of the car. In my haste I fumbled the keys, dropping them as I stepped onto the pavement. I didn't bother to pick them up – I didn't even bother to close my driver's side door. I flew to him, taking his hands in mine on impulse, my panic plain. He disengaged from me.

"Edward!" I couldn't come up with the proper words. "_Why?_" I finally managed.

"Come for a walk with me." He said, his voice unemotional.

I didn't answer. I couldn't think of how to protest, even though the last thing I wanted was to go for a walk. I needed answers. He'd left me in a crushing state of dread for a week and a half, and it seemed he'd done the same to his own family. What could have possessed him to do such a thing? How could he suggest we go for a walk when I was still speechless with the tremendous relief that he was alive?

He took my hand in his and guided me toward the east side of the yard, where the forest encroached. We'd gone only a few steps into the trees when he abruptly stopped. We were barely on the trail – I could still see the house.

Something on his face frightened me all over again. It was obvious that he'd wanted to walk further with me, to go on a real walk, but had changed his mind. He turned toward me, his eyes cold and hollow and as red as flowing blood.

"We're leaving."

I took a short breath. "What?"

"It's time. How much longer could we stay in Forks, after all? Carlisle can barely pass for twenty-five, and soon he'll be claiming thirty. We'd have to start over soon, regardless, even if I hadn't…" he trailed off.

My heart was racing, but not with the excitement I usually felt around Edward. This was fear. This was horror. This was knowing the answer before asking the question.

"When you say 'we'…"

"My family and myself."

I shook my head back and forth mechanically. "I don't understand."

"I don't expect you to." He said sharply. His tone was harsh, but fell flat. His face remained passive and empty, in discord with the anger his voice implied. "You're only a human."

I felt my eyebrows twisting, unsure what I should be feeling. "I don't have to be." I said. "You could change me. Right now, you could. I'm ready!"

Edward gave a hollow laugh, pulling his face into a sneer. His eyes stayed vacant. "I don't want you to come with me."

"You don't… want me?" I breathed.

"No."

"So all this, all the things you said… the things you gave me… the nights we spent together…"

He shrugged, looking indifferent. "What can I say? It was a phase. I'll be a teenager forever, after all. I guess my eternal life will just be a sequence of me trying on new roles."

"Don't." I begged. "Don't do this. It meant something… it wasn't nothing, Edward, it wasn't!"

"It was for me." He said. "I thought it was real at the time, but I've come around. It's what my brothers told me from the beginning. I'm not like you. I'll never be like you. I'm something else entirely. It was stupid to think this could last, not that I expect you to understand that."

"Why are you doing this? This way? Why did… where have you been, the last week? No one knew… what happened? Why are you leaving me? I thought you loved me!"

He shrugged again. "I changed my mind."

I stared at him helplessly. How could he be so cruel? I had never heard him speak to anyone in such a callous manner. I couldn't believe he was doing it to me.

"Anyway. I'm going." He added. "Try not to do anything reckless or stupid. It would be just like a mortal to react that way."

"And what do you care?" I whispered.

"I don't." He said, with more force than was needed. "But Charlie would. And your mother, your friends. I won't come back, so doing something stupid for my attention won't work. I'll never know about it. Go like I never existed, you might as well get on with what's _left_ of your life. It'll be better for you if you do."

"Better for me?" I said.

"Well, better for me." He amended. "If you start talking about vampires, the Volturi would surely come kill me. They're sort of like the police force of our kind. They're very strict about guarding the secret. They'd kill me, even if no one believed you. You'd probably get hospitalized for talking about it, anyway, but any rumor is enough to get executed for compromising our security. They'd probably kill you, too."

"I understand." I said.

He gave me a muted smile. "Don't worry. You're human – your memory is no more than a sieve. Time will erase the wound I've left."

I stared.

"That's everything, I suppose." He said. "We won't bother you again."

"I can't see the others? I can't talk to Carlisle… Alice?"

He gave me a skeptical look. "They don't want to talk to you," he said, as if it should be obvious. "They were only being polite, because of me. Anyway, they're already gone. I stayed to tell you goodbye."

"Why? Why not just leave?"

"I know how tenacious you are. It would be a hassle if I had to deal with you coming after me, looking for me. I wanted you to know that I'm not in need of rescue. I just can't bear to be around you anymore. So… goodbye, Bella."

I reached for him as he moved to walk away, but he brushed my hands away effortlessly. I slumped to the ground. My eyes closed for only a second, but when I opened them again, he was gone.

Edward was gone.

By some insane impulse, I pushed forward through the woods. All evidence that he'd been there was already gone, but this wasn't an act of reason. There were no footprints, the leaves were still, and the birds sang as if nothing had disturbed them in the first place. I could do nothing else, though. I kept moving. If I stopped looking for him… if I stopped searching… then it was over.

I felt like Holden Caulfield roaming the streets of New York, as if I could disappear at any second and only by clinging to the thoughts that Edward was still here could I survive. Only if I convinced myself that he didn't really want to hurt me, didn't want to leave me. And just as Holden prayed to his lost brother, prayed that Allie wouldn't let him disappear, so too did I pray to Edward that he wouldn't destroy everything that was inside of me. But it was too late for that.

I cleaved to my love for Edward. I held onto it as if it was the only thing in my life. All the other things I cared about – my family, my friends – seemed to fall away. I didn't want to think about them. I didn't want to talk to them. I didn't want to see them.

Time seemed to slide through my fingers as I wandered the forest. It didn't take me long to become desperately lost, but I didn't care. My awareness was dulled, blunted beyond all use. It grew darker and darker. I began to realize that my father would be worried that I hadn't returned home yet, but again, I didn't care. Nothing seemed to matter anymore.

The hopelessness grew within me. The rest of the world seemed far away. There is a threshold within a person, a level at which the pain can no longer be contained. Despair bubbled over and I burst into tears, falling to my knees and leaning against a tree for support. I turned my face away from the forest, as if even the trees were judging me.

I felt weak. I felt exposed. I felt ugly. I felt useless. I felt ashamed.

I felt degraded.

I cried until the tears stopped coming and my body could do no more than go through the motions, becoming a pale imitation of grief. I hadn't cried my fill. Normally, crying was a release for me. Normally, I felt better afterward. That didn't happen this time. The tears didn't help at all.

Exhaustion overcame me and I grasped the tree.

Night came.

I didn't look up, didn't see the sky. I didn't look at the trees, the plants. I didn't register the sounds around me. I didn't care about any of it. It wasn't important. And neither was I.

It was a long time before I heard them calling.

Someone was shouting my name. I didn't recognize the voice. I thought about answering, and I nearly wanted to, but my energy was so low that I couldn't bring myself to shout out.

"Here," I said. My own voice was muffled by the wet growth surrounding me.

I fell asleep.

Sometime later, the rain woke me. It didn't bother me – rather, it revived me – making me feel clean. I was surprised that it was possible, after the horrors of the previous day. But under the dim dawn sunlight and the cool wash of the rain, I almost felt better. I unwrapped my arms from around my legs and stood up. I began to stagger in the direction I believed to be home.

It was then that I hear the calling again. It was farther away this time, and sometimes it sounded as if several people were calling at once. I tried to breathe. I tried to answer. But I couldn't find the energy or desire to shout as I should have, giving a meek, "I'm here" for their efforts.

I wanted to get home. I really did. But more than that, I wanted the day before to have not happened. I wanted Edward to be here. I wanted him to be with me, now. To reassure me. To take care of me. To make me whole again.

Edward wasn't here.

After a while, I discovered I was slumped against a tree again. I didn't remember how I'd gotten there, or what had happened in the time between my last real memory and the present moment. Still dim and damp, I could tell that the sun was much higher overhead. Several hours must have passed. There was a nearby illumination, something I recognized in a far-away part of my mind, to be a propane lantern.

"Bella." The voice was deep. I didn't recognize it fully, but something about it seemed familiar. J didn't care enough to find out why. The tone of voice wasn't calling my name in a search, he was acknowledging that I had been found.

I tried to stand, but was too cold and tired to complete the action. I slumped again against the tree.

"Have you been hurt?"

How could I answer that? Physically, I was fine. But my current behavior was alarming – even from inside my shell, I nearly felt disturbed by it – and it was the result of a very internal type of pain.

"No." I heard myself say.

"My name is Sam Uley." The voice said. I remembered that I had met a Sam, once. A thousand years ago, on a beach in La Push. An older boy who knew Jacob Black, my friend. "Charlie sent me to look for you."

Charlie. With a sudden remorse, I remembered my father. What had he gone through, while I was overwhelmed in the woods? Had he thought I was hurt? Dead? Had he feared the same things I had when Edward had gone missing?

The tall man held out a hand. I took it, standing.

Charlie mattered, even if nothing else did.


	4. Chapter 4: Waking

**4. WAKING**

Time passes. Even when it seems impossible – even when you feel every second of the day with excruciating clarity. Even when it feels as if time could not move slower, one day, you look at the calendar and realize a month has passed. Two months. Three months. Time passes even when you are shattered.

It was very hard for me. I'd been utterly destroyed by Edward's leaving. I went through my days like a puppet. I did what was expected of me, and nothing more. I got perfect grades, sat with my friends at lunch, and went to work. But all of it was empty.

Except for the anger.

I was angry. Angry that Edward had done this. Angry that it had been so easy for him to rip out everything that was inside of me. Angry that the world kept turning, that people went on about their lives as if nothing had happened. Angry that people were careful with me. Angry at just how fragile I had turned out to be.

I was so angry that my life had become… this.

But I kept my anger inside myself, guarded it like a treasure. I didn't want other people to see it, and I didn't want them to try to make it go away. It was the only feeling I could hold onto anymore, and I needed it. I sank my nails into anger so that I wouldn't drift away.

…..

Charlie's fist came down on the table. "That's it, Bella! I'm sending you to Renee."

I looked up from my cereal, which I had been trying to choke down. Food had no flavor anymore, and I couldn't even remember the last time I'd felt the satisfaction that came after a good meal. It hardly seemed worth the effort to eat.

I stared at my father in surprise. I hadn't been listening to what he was saying, and I didn't know what response I had failed to give. I didn't know what had set him off.

"What did I do?" I asked, blindsided.

"You didn't do anything, Bella," he said. He rubbed his face, his elbow propped against the table as he looked at me with obvious worry. "That's the problem. You never do anything."

"You want me to get into trouble?" I snapped. I knew I had been irritable with him lately, but his concern bothered me. It only served to remind me that I was damaged.

"Trouble would be better than this! This... moping!"

I stared at him. "I'm not moping."

"Wrong word, then." He said. "Even moping would be better. That would be doing _something_. You're just… you've been so lifeless. You're not yourself."

"I'm sorry." My apology sounded a little flat, even to me. In honesty, I knew I hadn't been fooling him all this time. But it had only been a couple of months. Recovering would take time, wouldn't it? What did he expect?

"I don't want you to apologize." He sighed. "But Bella, honey. You're not the first person to go through this kind of thing."

"I know." But it didn't feel that way.

"I think… maybe you need some help."

"Help?"

"When your mother left, and took you with her…" he inhaled. "That was a really bad time for me. But I handled it. Honey, you're not handling this. I've waited, hoping it would get better. Hoping you'd get back into your old routine, with your friends and all. But I think we both know that this isn't getting better."

"I'm fine."

"Maybe if you talked to someone about it... a professional."

"You want me to see a shrink?" My tone was sharp.

"Maybe it would help."

"Maybe you should see one. You say you handled what happened with Mom, but I can't help but notice that the house is still full of pictures of her. Have you even dated anyone else? And how long, Dad? Seventeen years!"

He stared at me in shock. I should have felt bad, I was being cruel. But I didn't. I didn't feel anything at all, except for the anger. I stood up, grabbing my schoolbag from the chair next to me. "Look," I said. "I'll go out tonight, if you want. I'll call Jess."

"That's not what I'm talking about, Bella!" He argued, frustrated. "It's like your whole personality has changed! You're hurting the people around you."

"No, I'm not." I said.

"We both know what's really going on here, Bella, and it's not good for you! It's been months. No calls, no letters, no contact. You can't keep waiting for him!"

"I have to get to school." I snapped. "I'll make plans with Jessica. Maybe I won't be home for dinner. We'll go to Port Angeles and see a movie." I was out the front door, closing it behind me so I wouldn't have to hear him say anything more.

…..

"Jess?"

She twisted in her seat to face me, surprised. "Bella?"

I realized that we hadn't really talked in a long time. She'd seemed to have given up on me, though she still shot me concerned looks a lot. Not as frequently as Mike, but enough to embarrass me occasionally.

"I wanted to know if you'd… go to the movies with me tonight? I really need a girls' night out."

She gave me a tentative, but hopeful, smile. "Really?" She asked.

"You're the first person I think of when I want girl time."

"Sure, Bella! I was starting to think you didn't like me anymore." She said. I actually felt bad, which surprised me. I hadn't felt anything but anger or emptiness for a long time. "What do you want to see?"

"I'm not sure what's playing." I admitted. "How about that one with the woman president?"

She looked at me oddly. "Bella, that's been out of the theaters _forever_."

I shrugged. "Is there anything you'd like to see?"

Jessica's natural bubbliness took over. "Well, there's that new romantic comedy that's getting great reviews. I want to see that one. And my dad just saw Dead End and he really liked it."

"What's that about?"

"Zombies or something. He said it's the scariest thing he's seen in years."

"Perfect," I said. I gave her a small smile. I didn't want to see a romance.

"Do you want me to pick you up after school?"

"Sure."

Oddly enough, the rest of the day seemed to pass more quickly than usual. The brief interaction with Jessica had lifted my spirits. I was aware how strange it was, that such a small conversation could actually make a difference. It hit me how little human interaction I'd really had lately.

I felt belated guilt at the way I'd spoken to my father. He saw what I refused to. Going through the motions was not the same as being okay. I wasn't okay.

But for the first time in months, I felt ready to become okay. Or work toward it, anyway.

I drove home after school, planning to change my clothes before Jessica showed up to get me. I was already thinking about what I would say to my dad tonight, but I didn't have to wait. He was there. I walked into the kitchen, and he was sitting at the table.

"Oh!" I said. "I thought you were working tonight?"

"I took the evening off," he said. "I wanted to talk to you."

"Yeah… dad, listen. I'm really sorry. I was horrible, I can't believe I said that to you…" I frowned, turning my eyes away.

"I know you are, Bells. It's alright." His tone was strange, and I looked back at him. "And… you weren't wrong, either. About your mother and me."

I blinked, sitting down across from him. My dad didn't talk about his feelings. He just didn't. Any display of emotion embarrassed him, and I could see the tremendous effort it took for him to speak to me about this.

"You're right. I still love her." The room was silent for a moment. He shook his head. "I never… I never met another person like Renee. The way she made me feel. I don't know. Like she was always about to run off and do something amazing, and she could take me along with her." He smiled vaguely, not meeting my eyes. "And it happened so fast. I fell so hard, and once I'd fallen, I couldn't even remember what I'd felt like before I met her. It changed me. Changed my heart."

"Dad…"

He shook his head again. "No, it's… you know how hard it is for me, Bella. To talk about this. But I want you to understand. When she left, it was like she took a part of me with her. And for a while, I thought I could never go back to being who I was before. I guess I really haven't. No one else I've met since then has made me feel the way she did. Excited, and… stupid." He laughed softly. "I know it's weird to hear your dad talk about something like this. I just… I need you to know that I understand how you felt about Edward. I really do."

I looked away when he said the name. I still couldn't hear it without feeling gutted all over again.

"But Bella, it was different for me. Your mother and I, we got married. We had a baby. When something like that happens, it's hard to move on when it falls apart."

"It's hard to move on without that stuff, too." I protested.

"I know, honey. I know it is. But you just… you just have to. You can't make a future if you don't let go of your past."

"What if I never feel that way about someone again?" I asked, tears in my eyes.

"You will." He said.

"You said you didn't."

"Not yet." He conceded. "But I'm still open to it, still looking. I still believe I can find someone. It's never too late. And you're so young, you have your whole life to find another boy."

"Do you ever wish you hadn't met her?" I asked. "It would have been easier… if you'd never fallen in love with her in the first place. You wouldn't have had to go through all that."

"I have never once wished that," he denied firmly. "Not for one second. Not ever."

"Why? It's so awful… losing someone like that…"

"It hurts, yeah. A lot. And to still love someone who doesn't love you anymore, it can make a person so… tired. But if I had never met her, I wouldn't have you. And a world without you, Bells… it's not a world I would ever want to live in. No matter what."

I got up and threw my arms around him, burying my face in his shoulder so he wouldn't see me crying. I sniffled, and he hugged me back, his arms strong and sturdy and reassuring.

"The way you've been, Bella…" he said softly. "It really scares me. It's like you aren't even here sometimes. I miss you."

"I miss you too," I said, and realized it was true. "And I miss me!" I laughed as his arms released me, my hand coming up to wipe my tears away. I could see moisture in his eyes too, but even after the conversation we'd just had, he didn't seem able to let me see him cry.

There was a knock on the door. We both jumped. Charlie gave me a quizzical look.

"Oh! That's Jessica. We're going to a movie tonight."

"Really?" He was clearly surprised.

"Yeah. After this morning… I was upset with myself. I knew that you were right. I want to try harder."

He gave me a relieved smile. "I'm so glad, Bella."

"Yeah, I mean… I guess I needed to hear it. And it's weird, because I didn't even really want to talk to anyone, but as soon as I started talking to Jessica I felt a little better. I hadn't realized how little I'd been with my friends."

"Have fun," he said, smiling broadly. He stood up. "I'm really glad we talked. I think I'll go into work, after all."

"Drive safe," I said, giving him a slight smile. He hadn't said it to me in a long time, because I hadn't been going anywhere.

"I will. You'd better get the door,"

I smiled. It still hurt, but I felt more hopeful than I had before.

…..

The next morning, the numb feeling had returned. I tried to be more energetic than I had been, but I could tell that this would be a long process, not something that could be fixed in one day. I tried to summon up the hope that had lifted me out of my stupor the previous day, but it proved more difficult to access than I'd thought.

I dressed slowly, and looked at myself in the mirror.

"You can do this." I said softly. "You can do it. You can. Don't give up."

I wasn't able to convince myself. However, I wouldn't stop trying. I'd reached an almost normal feeling the day before. I could find it again. It would just be hard. Months of depression didn't go away on its own. Clearly this would take some work.

"Morning, Bella!" My dad was more cheerful than I'd seen him in a long time, but just seeing him so happy made me feel a little more hopeful. It was sort of like when I'd spoken to Jessica, and she'd been so happy to talk to me. Just realizing that she cared and wanted to talk to me made me feel better.

I quickly came to the conclusion that the answer was people. I needed to be around people. I couldn't climb out of this hole on my own, I needed help. And, judging from Jessica's happiness to be at the movies with me, they were willing to help me.

Dad actually whistled as he poured me a bowl of cereal. I smiled at him, taking the bowl and sitting to eat. It seemed to have a little more flavor than I'd gotten used to. Dad fixed his cup of coffee and sat down with the newspaper.

I tried to focus on the details of my food, to be aware of the moment instead of drifting into the haze that I'd been wading through for the past couple months. I looked up when my father sucked his teeth at something he was reading, eyebrows drawing together.

"Tell you what, Bella, Seattle is getting dangerous. Lots of strange murders going on there. My buddy in homicide there thinks it could be a serial killer."

"A serial killer?" I asked.

"They're finding people with their throats torn out, and there's been a spike in missing persons."

I stared. "Their throats?"

"Very bloody," he nodded. "They get their throat ripped open and bleed out, but there's never blood around where the body's found. Dave thinks that means the people are getting killed somewhere else and dumped."

I had a different theory.

"You'd better stay out of Seattle until this clears up, Bella." Dad continued. "I know you're used to Phoenix and all, but this isn't about the size of the city. Things are ugly there right now. I don't want you going there until they catch this guy, okay?"

"Okay."

"Port Angeles is a better place for you, it's safer. And if you absolutely have to get to Seattle, I'll go with you."

"Don't worry, I don't need to go there." Especially if there were vampires killing people.

"Good, thanks. Well, I'm off."

After Charlie left, I sat at the table for a long time. It was certainly possible that there was a serial killer in Seattle, but I couldn't convince myself that it wasn't a vampire. Throats torn out? People bleeding out, without any blood to be found? It was too suspicious, knowing what I knew. But it wasn't the Cullens. They didn't drink from people, they only fed from animals. Someone else was here. I was scared.

I called Alice.

"Bella." She answered. Caller ID. I didn't know how to begin. I knew she thought I was going to ask about Edward, even though I couldn't bring myself to say his name.

"Alice, I…" I said. I took a deep breath.

"It's not a good time." She said.

"Wait!" I said. "It's important. It's not about – it's not about him."

"I'm busy, Bella." Her voice was cold, detached, and beautiful. I could tell she didn't believe me.

"There's a vampire in Seattle!" I blurted.

There was a silence.

"What do you mean?" Alice asked.

"My dad told me about these murders in Seattle! People are getting their throats torn out and are bleeding to death, but there's never any blood left behind. It has to be a vampire. A vampire is killing people in Seattle and leaving the bodies. Dad said they're thinking it's a serial killer, but there's no way they'll be able to catch a vampire, Alice. I thought… I don't know. Maybe you can do something to stop them."

"You want us to come back there to kill another vampire?" She asked. "We're not detectives, Bella."

"You can't just let them keep killing people!" I protested.

"I'll alert the Volturi. That's all I can do." She hung up.

I swallowed. I felt strange, hearing her voice. And it was like she was being deliberately cold toward me, like she was trying to distance herself even though I couldn't exactly come after her. I didn't even know where she was.

I guess Edward had been right, that day. They didn't care about me. They were just being polite. Because of him.


	5. Chapter 5: Cheater

**5. CHEATER**

"Bella, why don't you take off." Mike suggested, his eyes focused off to the side, not really looking at me. I had never noticed him do that before, but his body language suggested it was nothing out of the ordinary. None of his usual theatrics or flirtation colored his speech the way I was accustomed to. I realized that, while I had been so depressed, he had detached from me somewhat. I'd only ever noticed that he would give me concerned looks – which I noticed because they irritated me. I'd completely missed that he mostly left me alone anymore.

"I don't mind staying," I said. It was a slow day at Newton's, at the moment only two patrons were in the store. They were both backpackers, who had moved on from their pricings to a conversation of one-upmanship about their tales from the trail.

Mike looked up at me with a curious smile, and I wondered if he'd gotten used to me taking every opportunity to avoid being around people. He seemed pleased that I'd chosen to stay, even if there wasn't much going on that day.

"I haven't seen many bears around this year," a thickset man with dark hair but a red beard told his companion. "The closest contact I've had this fall was a set of muddy paw prints on the bottom of my bear bag." His hair was grimy and his fingernails were filthy, and his clothes had clearly been worn for more than a few days. Fresh from the mountains.

"I'm telling you," the second man was tall and lean, his face tanned and wind-chapped. "I've seen grizzlies close up in Yellowstone, but they had nothing on the one I saw."

"Not around here," the first one was skeptical. "Black bears don't get that big."

"Seriously, Bella, these two are going to go on forever. Go on home." Mike said.

"If you want me to go…" I shrugged.

He gave me another smile. "Of course not, brown eyes," he said, his schmoozing voice making a new appearance. "But as soon as these fellas get out of here, I'm closing up."

"Are you sure your parents will be okay with that?" I asked.

Mike gave me a wicked grin. I shook my head.

"Hey – Mike, right?" the man with the red beard called toward us.

"Yes, sir!" Mike said, snapping to attention.

"See you Monday," I said, grabbing my coat and walking toward the door. Mike watched me go, and I felt a small spike in my confidence. Edward might not want me, but Mike certainly seemed interested.

"Have there been warnings around here recently, about bears?"

"No, sir. But it's always good to keep your distance and store your food correctly. If they don't see you as a threat or an inconvenience, you're usually okay. They're more predictable than moose, at least…"

"No kidding!" The other man laughed. "I had this moose, one time – "

I didn't hear what the moose had done, instead pushing out into the cool afternoon air. I inhaled the dampness, realizing for the first time that Mike really knew a lot about camping and the wilderness. I'd never really been outdoorsy in that way, but hearing his excitement when he sometimes spoke to the customers made me wonder if it was worth trying.

Edward had loved the outdoors too, but it was different with him… he didn't have to know much about animals or food storage, because that was irrelevant to his life. He didn't eat, and animals couldn't hurt him. He was limited by his condition, too. He couldn't just go out with friends to a camping ground like anyone else could.

Maybe I should see if Mike would teach me about camping. I needed to get back out in the world, get back to being with people, and perhaps it would take opening up to new things for that to happen.

I climbed into my truck as the rain started coming down, hammering deafeningly against the hood of the car. I turned the ignition and felt warmth rush into me as the engine roared to life, drowning out the sound of the weather.

I didn't want to go back to the house. Last night had been brutal. I'd been plagued by nightmares since Edward had left. Each of them was part of the same theme. Abandonment. I dreamt that my father disappeared, I dreamt that my mother rejected me, I dreamt the scene of Edward leaving me over and over, with him replaced by every friend I'd made in my entire time in Forks. I dreamt of the true rejection I'd experienced by my three friends in Phoenix. I often woke up with a scream, the one physical experience that ripped me out of my dream. Charlie didn't come in to see what was wrong, anymore. He was used to it, just as I wished I was.

I wasn't paying attention to where I was driving – just wandering through empty side roads as I avoided the ways that would take me home – trying to find anything else to keep me occupied until my father got home and I could return without loneliness.

_Go like I never existed._ The words arrived with shocking immediacy, but they were soundless, like print on a page. Just words. Yet they ripped open a hole in my heart, a hole I'd been trying to ignore. It was like a sore in my mouth that I couldn't help but press my tongue against, a wound that pained me but that I couldn't stop needling.

I pulled over in a neighborhood, pressing my face against the steering wheel and focusing on my breathing. I didn't know what to do. What if this never got better? What if I felt this way forever? Could I survive my entire life with Edward in the back of my mind?

_Go like I never existed_. What an impossible demand! Even after I'd destroyed the gifts he'd given me, after I'd buried all evidence of him in the back of my closet, after I'd ripped the stereo from my car with my bare hands, tearing my fingernails to pieces… even then I couldn't convince myself that he hadn't been there. The physical evidence was the most insignificant part of the relationship. _I_ was changed. 'It changed my heart', my father had said. And the same had happened to me. I could not just change back into who I was before I met him. I didn't even want to.

He had told me, at the prom, that he wanted to be with me forever. Time and again he'd promised he loved me, promised me he'd stay with me, and I had done the same for him. But he'd broken his promise. And now, the last thing he'd requested of me, 'don't do anything reckless or stupid,' seemed unreasonable. Who was he to ask me anything? Why should I feel the need to do what he asked, when he had done me so terribly?

I wiped my eyes and leaned back into my seat, again, gazing out the windshield. I was in front of the Cheneys' house – Angela's boyfriend was their son – and across the road lived the Marks family. A sign in the Marks' yard caught my eye. A big piece of cardboard leaned against their mailbox post, with black letters scrawled across it. 'FOR SALE, AS IS'. My eyes drifted to the yard next to the sign, where two dilapidated motorcycles were rusting in the grass.

My father hated motorcycles. To him, they were the very definition of reckless and stupid.

Perfect.

…..

Austin Marks' little brother helped me get both motorcycles into my car, saying I could salvage some parts. He didn't charge me anything for them – apparently their mother had insisted that their father get rid of the bikes, and they hadn't had any offers yet. I felt a curious rush of adrenaline when I drove away with them, as though just taking the broken down bikes was reckless.

In some ways it was… my father would kill me if he knew. I had to find somewhere to take them, and someone to fix them. But who?

The answer came at once, and I felt stupid for even wondering. It was so obvious. Jacob Black.

I hadn't seen him since Edward had left, though I hadn't seen much of anyone after that. But he'd fixed my truck before my father had bought it, and I'd never had a single problem with it, other than the loud engine and the fact that it couldn't go over fifty-five-miles-per-hour. Maybe he knew about bikes, too.

I drove quickly and purposefully now. I called my father at work and told him I was going to go visit Jacob. He was clearly pleased by the idea, and gave me directions.

The Blacks' house was vaguely familiar, a small wooden place with narrow windows, the dull red paint making it resemble a tiny barn. Jacob was outside before I could even get out of the truck, no doubt brought out by the sound of my truck's engine.

"Bella!" His excited grin stretched wide across his face, the bright teeth standing in vivid contrast to the deep russet color of his skin. I'd never seen his hair out of its ponytail before, and it fell like black satin curtains on either side of his face. As I approached him, I realized that he had grown up a lot in the past few months. The soft muscles of childhood had hardened into the solid, lanky build of a teenager. His face was still sweet like I remembered it, but it was different, too. The planes of his cheekbones were sharper, his jaw squared off. Matured.

"Hey, Jacob," I felt an unfamiliar surge of enthusiasm at his smile. I realized I was pleased to see him. It was as if something clicked silently into place; two corresponding puzzle pieces finding each other again. It was an unusual sort of instinctive chemistry, a natural liking that I didn't have with anyone else.

"You grew!" I said in amazement.

He laughed, his smile widening. "Six five," he announced with a hint of pride. His voice was deeper, too. "Come inside! You're getting soaked."

He went into the house, holding the door for me.

"Dad, look who stopped by!"

Billy, Jacob's father, was in the tiny square living room, a book in his hands. He set the book in his lap and wheeled himself forward when he saw me.

"It's good to see you, Bella," he said. "What brings you out? Everything okay with Charlie?" His eyes held something more, some unreadable emotion that related to me. I wasn't sure what it was. Concern, perhaps? Suspicion? It occurred to me that my father had probably spoken about my recent difficulties with Billy.

"Everything's fine at home," I said honestly. "I just wanted to see Jacob – it's been a really long time."

Jacob's eyes brightened at my words. He was smiling so big it looked like it would hurt.

"Can you stay for dinner?" Billy asked.

"I'll have to see – I probably ought to feed my dad. We've been subsisting on takeout for way too long," I gave them a sheepish smile.

"I'll call him now," Billy said. "He's always invited."

I laughed, but tried to think of how to prevent that. If my dad came here, he'd see the bikes, I had no doubt. Then I'd be in deep trouble.

"It's not like you'll never see me again. I promise I'll be back again soon – so much you'll get sick of me." After all, if Jacob could fix the bike, someone had to teach me how to ride it.

Billy smiled and shrugged. "Okay, maybe next time."

Jacob and I went back outside. He wanted to show me his garage, the new car he was working on. It was the perfect opportunity to ask him about the bikes.

A thick stand of trees and shrubbery concealed his garage from the house. The garage was no more than a couple of big preformed sheds that had been bolted together with their interior walls knocked out. Under this shelter, raised on cinder blocks, was what looked to me like a completed automobile. I recognized the symbol on the grille.

"What kind of Volkswagen is that?"

"It's a 1986 Rabbit, a classic."

"How's it going?"

"It's almost finished!" He said. "My dad made good on his promise… you know, last spring…"

I nodded, remembering the prom. Jacob had been bribed by his father with money and car parts to deliver a message to me, to tell me not to be with Edward. It had turned out that his concern was well-placed. Edward had destroyed me.

"Jacob, what do you know about motorcycles?" I asked.

He shrugged. "A little. My friend Embry has a dirt bike. We work on it together sometimes. Why?"

"Well…" I wasn't sure if he could keep his mouth shut, but I knew he would do just about anything for me. At least, that's the impression he'd given me. And he was the only one I knew who had any mechanical skills at all. "I recently acquired a couple of bikes, and they're in pretty bad condition. I wonder if you could get them running?"

He smiled in surprise. "Absolutely!" He said. "I'll give it a try!"

I held up one finger. "The thing is, my dad hates motorcycles. He'd probably have a heart attack if he found out about this. So you can't tell Billy."

"I wouldn't dream of it," Jacob smiled.

"I can pay you," I continued.

"No." He looked affronted. "I want to help, you can't pay me."

I wanted to give him something for helping me. I knew he had a crush on me, and I didn't want this to be something he did in hopes of getting a date. "How about a trade, then? I only need one bike – and I'll need riding lessons, too. So how about you keep the other bike, and you can teach me."

"Sweet!"

"Wait a sec – are you legal yet?" I asked suddenly.

He grinned, then pulled a pouting face. "You missed my birthday. I'm sixteen."

"Give me a break," I said. "You were driving illegally already, so how am I supposed to know? Sorry about your birthday, though."

"Don't worry about it, I missed yours, too. What are you now, forty?"

I smiled. "Forty-five, actually."

"We'll have to throw a joint party to make up for it."

"It's a date." I said. His eyes sparkled at the words, and I turned my eyes away. "Maybe when the bikes are finished. Our presents to ourselves."

"Deal. When will you bring them down?"

I gave him a sheepish look. "They're in my truck now," I admitted. "I couldn't let Dad see them."

Jacob laughed, a rich, hearty sound. "Great!" He said. "We'll be sneaky bringing them round, to keep my dad from spotting us," he winked.

He pulled the bikes from my truck effortlessly, which made me feel especially weak. They'd been quite heavy, in my memory. Jacob appraised them as we pushed them through the cover of trees. "These aren't bad," he said. "This one will actually be worth something when we're done – it's an old Harley Sprint."

"It's yours."

He grinned at me again, an expression I was coming to really like. He made me feel warm again, and it was so immediate, like being around him removed all the lingering connections to Edward. It was strange, but such a relief that it never occurred to me that I should wonder why it was happening. I just enjoyed it.

_[A/N: Sorry about the delay in this chapter, guys. I have been really busy – I had to move for school and I've been getting settled and attending some early meetings and things for my program. I'll try to be more active in the future, but my classes start next week so I can't make any promises just yet because I don't know how demanding they'll be. Thanks for understanding! I haven't forgotten this project, and I have planned out what's going to happen, so don't worry!]_


	6. Chapter 6: Friends

**6. FRIENDS**

Birds were chirping. I opened my eyes, staring up at the cloudy sky above me. Trees shivered in the breeze, their dark leaves reaching upward like so many hands. I couldn't see the birds, but I didn't understand their cheerfulness beneath such a heavy sky.

I was suddenly standing, though it didn't occur to me that it was peculiar I didn't remember moving. I could hear a voice. Edward's voice. It was deep in the forest, completely shrouded in darkness.

"I never existed," Edward's voice said, a thin whisper from the shadows. "I never existed, I never existed, I never existed…"

"Edward!" I shouted. My own voice echoed back. Edward's voice vanished. I was afraid.

"Bella." It was a different voice, and my fear vanished. I turned around, to where Jacob stood behind me. I looked at him in surprise – I had not heard him approach. He smiled, and the smile continued to widen and widen and widen, seeming larger than everything around us. I smiled in response, his happiness infectious. My heart tugged me toward him, and I held tight to the feeling like it was a secret treasure.

"Jacob!"

He took my hand, his palm hot against my cold fingers.

"It's time to go, Bella." He said, his voice as warm as his hands. He began to walk, pulling me after him.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"We're going home."

I woke suddenly, in a flood of relief and comfort.

I didn't understand it.

I'd been having nightmares for months, every night, and now this? I wasn't even sure what the dream had been about. Going home? I was already home. But strangest were the feelings that I'd gotten from dream-Jacob. Safety. Happiness. Most of all, love.

Love! How could I? I didn't even know Jacob that well, we'd only recently started spending time together more seriously. We'd gone and picked up parts for the bikes, I'd been spending almost every afternoon or evening in his garage, work permitting. I'd met his friends, Quil and Embry, both of them characters in their own right.

But it had only been a few weeks. Far too soon for dreams where I felt love for him. That was what had happened with Edward, and it had turned me into a hollow shell. I couldn't allow it again. I wouldn't.

I leaned forward in bed, against my knees. I pressed my hand to my mouth, and discovered that there were tears rolling down my cheeks. I sniffed, trying to push my dream away. I got up and went to the bathroom to take a shower and wash my confusion away.

…

"Bella?"

Jacob and I both looked up as my father's voice called through the trees, sounding closer than the house. Billy couldn't navigate his wheelchair over the uneven terrain between the house and the garage, but my dad would have no trouble with it. I hadn't expected him here, and Jacob was currently showing me how to adjust the brake line on my bike, our hands touching.

"Oh no," I said. "Coming!" I called back toward the house.

"Let's go!" Jacob enjoyed the sneaking around, that much was evident. He had a broad grin on his face and his voice was saturated with barely-concealed laughter. We shot up together and he snapped the light off, leaving me temporarily blind. His hand was rough and very warm as he took mine, his feet finding the familiar path to the house quite easily.

Even once we emerged into the blue light of early evening, we were both tripping over our feet in the darkness. We got to laughing at our own clumsiness. It felt good. Jacob always managed to make me laugh, something I'd gone far too long without. It was so wonderful how just a bit of laughter buoyed your spirits, as if to reinforce your pleasure. Self-perpetuating.

My dad was standing under the little back porch of the Black's house, and Billy sat in the doorway behind him.

"Hey, Dad!" We both said at the same time, which started us laughing again.

Charlie's eyes flashed down to where Jacob's hand held mine. I knew what he was thinking, but somehow I didn't even mind.

"Billy invited us for dinner," he said in a distracted tone.

"I have a super-secret recipe for spaghetti. It's been handed down for generations," Billy said gravely. He had a talent for making things sound very significant, even when they were silly. It was one of the things I liked most about him. When I first met him, it was hard to tell when he was joking, because he so often spoke in the same tone. Now I understood that he was joking more often than not, and his understated sense of humor tickled me to no end.

Jacob was laughing. "I don't think Ragu's been around for generations!"

There were voices coming out of the house, and I realized that it was going to be a crowded evening. Harry Clearwater was there with his family – his wife, Sue, who I remembered vaguely from my childhood summers in Forks, and his two children. Leah was a senior like me, though a bit older. She was beautiful, with perfect copper skin and glistening black hair, eyelashes like feather dusters. She was on Billy's phone when we got in, and through the night she never let it go. Seth, her brother, was fourteen. He hung on Jacob's every word with idolizing eyes. It was charming, in a way. Jacob treated Seth so kindly, like an older brother, and it was clear that Seth greatly admired Jacob. It was the first time I really began to understand how close Jacob's family was with their community, and how outside of that community I was. I suddenly wished that I was part of them. I wanted to know them all better.

Too many people were there to sit around the kitchen table, so my dad and Harry brought chairs out to the yard. We ate spaghetti off plates on our laps in the dim light from Billy's open door. It was chilly out, but the food warmed us, steam rising from the hot spaghetti like breath. The adults talked about the game, and Harry and my father made plans for fishing. Sue teased her husband about his cholesterol and tried to get him to eat something green and leafy, though he joked around it and by the end of the night, I don't think he'd eaten a single vegetable.

My dad watched me, trying to be inconspicuous about it, as I talked with Jacob and Seth, who was quick to include me but was obviously more interested in Jacob. His eyes were cautious as he watched us, but I could see his deep satisfaction that I was beginning to be myself again.

The night was loud and sometimes confusing as everyone talked over everyone else, and the laughter from one joke interrupted the telling of another. Harry swore like a sailor, which was funny to me and Jacob both, but my dad chastised him for it every time. That became a joke in itself, where Harry began to say 'kids, plug your ears!' before every curse word he spoke. I smiled a lot, because I felt happy, and the whole thing was like being part of a big family.

I didn't want to leave.

The inevitable rain eventually broke up the party; Billy's living room was much too small to provide an option for continuing the get together. Most of us ran, laughing, to the warmth of our cars. Harry and Seth, however, began running around in the rain, stomping in the mud and trying to splash others. Seth shook his hair at my father, who grinned as he climbed into my truck (Harry had driven him down), wagging a not-so-stern finger at the younger boy.

We drove back to town, and I could see my dad's gaze lingering on the cavity in my truck where I'd torn out with my fingers the stereo that Emmett Cullen had installed. He finally turned his eyes away from the strange reminder of my recent depression, gazing out the windshield as the rain grew ever heavier. He asked about my day, and I told him the near-truth – that I'd gone with Jacob to look at parts and then watched him work in his garage.

"He's trying to teach me some things, but I don't know if I've really got the head for it," I said.

"Think you'll visit again anytime soon?" He wondered. I could tell he was trying to be casual about it.

"Tomorrow after school," I said. "I really like being with Jacob. There's something about him… I don't know, his energy or something. It's practically impossible to not be happy around him. He pulls you in somehow,"

My dad grinned and gave me an appraising look, but seemed to have the good judgment not to ask whether anything romantic was going on with us. "Well, don't let your homework get away from you,"

"I'll take some with me, tomorrow." I promised.

I was nervous to go upstairs. The warmth of Jacob's presence was fading, and I worried about what would replace it. Anxiety had plagued me for so long, I was certain it would fill in the void left by my happiness over the evening.

But I was wrong. The flush of excitement that I felt with Jacob did eventually evaporate, but what remained was still good. A feeling of belonging, and a strange sense of accomplishment, too. I wasn't sure how he'd done it, but it was as if Jacob had cured me.

I checked my email, and for the first time I saw with clarity what had happened between myself and my mother. Her letters sounded like a journal entry; a personal reflection and log of events, it didn't sound like she was writing to someone else. She wrote about her day, a new book club that she'd been attending after quitting her meditation classes – she just had too active a mind to make it quiet down, she thought – about the week she'd spent subbing for second grade, and how she missed her kindergarteners. She wrote that Phil was enjoying his new job. They were planning a second honeymoon.

I wrote back to her quickly, trying to engage with everything she had said. I commented on each part of her letter, volunteering information of my own. I then talked about the spaghetti party at Billy's and how I'd felt watching Jacob build things. How his hands looked too big to perform the delicate tasks he used them for, how it was like a second nature to him, how he seemed to know things by instinct as often as not. I told her how I felt envious at it, and hoped that Jacob's skill would rub off on me a bit. How I wished I was so dedicated to something, and that perhaps I would start taking photos again, remembering the feeling I'd had when my photos came out looking good.

I made no reference to the change this letter would be from the ones she'd been receiving. The more I thought about how unresponsive I'd been (I barely even remembered what I'd written), the guiltier I felt. I must have really worried her.

Homework should have taken my focus, then. I was far behind, spending so much time with Jacob. But I was too tired. I crawled into bed, feeling the pillowy comforter and the warm pillow pulling me into their gentle promise of rejuvenation. I couldn't even bring myself to worry about whether the bad dreams would return.

They didn't. I slept without dreaming.

…

I remembered the first day I'd come to Forks. I'd desperately wished I could turn grey, fade into the wet concrete of the sidewalk like a chameleon. That wish appeared to have come true, though I'd been too zoned out to even notice it until now. It was like I wasn't there. Even my teachers' eyes slid past my seat as if it were empty. The past few weeks, I'd been awake. But only when I was with Jacob. Now I was awake in another setting, and it was strange. I hadn't even noticed the difference between myself at school and myself in La Push, but I did now.

I could hear the voices of the people around me again. I tried to catch up on what was going on, but people didn't just conveniently summarize the last several months before continuing their conversations. I wasn't some character in a novel that could be given a lot of exposition from the others around her.

My fourth hour class got out late, and the lunch table I always sat at was full by the time I arrived. Mike was there, Jessica and Angela, Conner, Tyler, Eric and Lauren. Katie Marshall, a redheaded junior who lived around the corner from me, was sitting with Eric. Austin Marks – whose family had given me the motorcycles – was next to her. I wondered how long they'd been sitting here, unable to remember if this was the first time or if it was a regular thing.

It was shocking to realize how much I had missed. Unsure of myself, I listened quietly, trying to catch up with the conversation.

"Where's Ben today?" Lauren asked Angela.

"Ben's got the stomach flu," Angela said. "Hopefully it's just a twenty-four-hour thing. He was really sick last night."

"What did you do this weekend?" Jess asked.

"We were going to have a picnic Saturday, but… we changed our minds," Angela said. There was an edge to her voice that caught my interest.

"How come?" I asked. Everyone at the table looked at me in surprise. I shifted uneasily under their gaze, but Angela gave me a reassuring look, even as she hesitated over the answer.

"Oh," she said. "Well, we drove up north, almost to the hot springs. There's a good spot for picnics just about a mile up the trail. But when we were halfway there… we saw something… strange."

"Saw something? What?" Lauren demanded. Her tone indicated she was more interested in a juicy story than concern for her friend. Tyler's annoyed look in her direction mirrored my own feelings about Lauren.

"I don't know." Angela admitted. "We _think_ it was a bear. It was black, anyway, but… it was shaped differently. I don't know. It was huge."

Lauren snorted. "Not you, too!" Her eyes were mocking, something that Angela would never have deserved. "Tyler tried to sell me that one last week."

Tyler rolled his eyes. "I didn't try to sell you anything," he said.

"Bears don't get that close to the resort," Jessica said, shaking her head.

"Well, we saw something." Angela protested in a low voice, looking down. Lauren actually laughed, then, which pushed me past the edge.

"No, she's right." I threw in impatiently. "We had a hiker a couple weeks ago who saw the bear, too, Angela. He said it was huge and black, just outside of town. Remember, Mike?"

There was another moment of stunned silence. Every pair of eyes turned back to me with renewed shock. Nobody moved.

"Mike?" I muttered, mortified. "Remember the guy? A couple Saturdays ago…"

Mike recovered, bless him. He pushed his hand through the careful disarray of his hair. He winked at me, pleased at my outburst for some reason I couldn't fathom. "Sure," he said. "Yeah, there was a guy who said he saw a huge black bear right at the trailhead – bigger than a grizzly."

"Hmph." Lauren turned to Jessica, her shoulders stiff and her eyes cold, hovering on my face for a second, before changing the subject, asking Jessica about her college applications.

Everyone else looked away, too, except for Mike, Angela and Tyler. Angela smiled at me, and I hurried to return it.

"So what did you do this weekend, Bella?" Tyler asked. I felt bad for having ignored him, too. We'd been pretty good friends before I'd fallen apart over Edward.

"I went down to La Push," I said. The eyes flickered back to me, still surprised to hear my voice. "My friend Jacob lives down there. I've been hanging out with him a lot, we're fixing up – " I paused, suddenly worried that if I shared too much, my father would find out.

"What?" Tyler asked, his mossy green eyes curious.

I leaned forward conspiratorially. "Well, you can't tell anyone." I said. Tyler grinned, and Mike and the others looked more interested. Austin already knew, of course, but it seemed he hadn't shared with anyone that I had taken his family's battered bikes off their hands. "I got a couple old motorcycles, the ones that Austin's dad was giving away. Jacob knows all about mechanical stuff, he built my truck. So he's been working on fixing the bikes up, with me."

"You're gonna be a biker girl?" Tyler laughed at the mental image. "Should I get you a leather jacket with studs and all?"

I pulled a face at him, feeling more like my old self as he slipped so easily back into friendliness. "I don't know if we'll ever get the damn things running." I said truthfully.

"Yeah, they were in pretty awful shape," Austin added.

"But it's fun, anyway. I just can't really tell my dad. Even though it's a longshot, if he knew we were working on bikes he'd kill me. He hates motorcycles, thinks they're dangerous."

"They _are_, Bella!" Jessica said.

The rest of the lunch hour was spent discussing the merits and faults of motorcycles. Although most evidence went straight into the 'con' category, the main 'pro' – they're cool – seemed powerful enough that even the anti-bike opinion couldn't quite fight it.

As we left lunch, Angela walked beside me.

"Thanks," she said after we had separated from the rest of the group. "You know, for sticking up for me."

I shrugged. "No problem." I said, though I knew the comment didn't quite line up with my recent attitude.

"Are you okay?" She asked quietly, her eyes tender. I'd always liked Angela, she had such a generous heart, but she was a little too perceptive. I knew what she meant when she asked me things like that.

"Not completely." I said. I didn't want to lie to her. I'd had to lie for Edward so much, and I didn't want to continue doing it now that I didn't have to. "But I'm getting better."

"I'm glad." She said. "I missed you."

…

Jacob and I were supposed to meet, that afternoon. I didn't have work, and our usual arrangement was that on days where I didn't work, I went straight to La Push after school. His classes got out about thirty minutes before mine did, and so normally he was already in the garage when I got there. But today, I'd been disappointed. Jacob texted me just as I was leaving the school.

cant work today. quil & i need to talk to embry

about something. sorry bella, ill miss u. see u

tomorrow k? x jacob

I didn't know what Quil and Jacob needed to talk to Embry about, but I knew it wasn't really my business, even though I was let down. I wanted to ask, to be nosy… but I decided not to. I was certain that Jacob would tell me, tomorrow.

But what could I do, today? I couldn't just go home.

So there I was, sitting in my truck. I was just outside the turn that would take me to the Cullens' house. I wasn't sure what the hell I was doing there, it was like I was trying to push myself back into my stupor. I couldn't remember being so impulsive, before, but here I was. Doing something stupid. Something reckless. Something that could be damaging to me. And I didn't have the self-control to stop myself.

I turned down the drive, gripping the wheel so tightly that my knuckles turned white and my fingers began to tingle. There was something to search for. Unattainable and uncaring, but _he_ was there. His spirit, like a fingerprint, on the house he'd lived in. I had to believe that. And I had to see it, to face it, to spit at it. What he had done was unforgivable, and yet…

Yet…

I drove toward the house.

I hadn't been to the house since the birthday party, since Carlisle had stitched me up. Since Jasper had snapped, and Edward had withdrawn into himself.

The thick, jungle-like growth crawled slowly past my windows. I started to drive faster, getting edgy, until my engine sputtered and strained to move more quickly, a losing battle. The lane was so overgrown that it did not look familiar.

What if I couldn't find it? What if there was no proof they'd been here at all?

Then the break in the trees, the opening that I'd been looking for. I was here. The flora had not waited long to reclaim the unguarded land. Tall ferns had infiltrated the meadow around the house, crowding against the trunks of the cedars, even pushing their way up to the wide porch.

Something about the house seemed different. It looked exactly the same, on the outside, but it was vacant. It reminded me strangely of when my grandmother had died. The viewing had shaken me up. I couldn't understand how she could look the same as she had in life – just exactly the same – while being undeniably and completely altered. Her soul had left her body, and it was so _tangible_, even though she looked only like she was sleeping. The life was gone.

And so it was with the house. The life had gone out of it, been yanked from its bowels by force. The life was somewhere else, now. I didn't know where.

I cut the engine and jumped out into the sea of green. I walked forward, climbed onto the porch, stumbling slightly on the mossy steps. On the outside, I felt no lingering sense of their presence. No sense of his presence.

I pressed my hands against the front-facing windows. They were chilled against my skin, and the house was so dark within – and such a glare came off the glass – that I could see nothing inside. But I had to know. I had to know if they had taken everything of themselves – everything that had furnished their lives here – was gone. Was the house completely empty? Was there nothing left?

Another impulsive, stupid action to pile on with the rest. I wrapped my hands around a heavy wooden porch chair and lifted it, hurling with all my strength. It hit the window, shattering the glass. I covered my face as the fragments of glass chimed to the planks beneath my feet.

For a long time I stared at the cavity where the window had been, stunned at my own law-breaking. What was I doing? How could I justify this to myself, to anyone else?

But there was no one else here, no one to see, to know, to ask me about it or judge me for it. So I set the chair back upright and stepped onto it, climbing through the window-frame carefully, to avoid cutting myself on the shards of glass that remained in place.

The glass crunched under my boots as my eyes adjusted to the dark house. Edward's piano still stood to the left of the entrance, looming like a dark monster waiting to snap me up for my trespassing. I walked away from it, through the wide, open house. I returned to the dining room, where Carlisle had stitched up my wound, an area that was just for show. All the furniture was where it belonged, untouched, as if the family might return at any moment.

In a way, it was worse than if the house had been empty. It proved the hideous truth, which was that nothing in the world mattered to the Cullens. There was nothing to hold them here. No physical presence that tied them to their lives. It was all worthless to them, all irrelevant.

I walked into the kitchen. Another room just for show, but a beautiful room nonetheless. Long, shining granite counters were framed by gleaming steel appliances, all sparklingly clean. All cold, and hard, and lifeless. I looked through their cupboards, through the sets of ceramic flatware and through their good china. The refrigerator had all the niceties of life, carefully presented to appear normal. A plastic bottle of mustard that felt about half full, a droplet of hardened yellow on the squeeze top. I wondered if they just threw the food away to make it look as if someone had used it. They couldn't have eaten it, themselves.

Everything in the refrigerator was like that; partially discarded. But nothing inside was perishable, at least not in an immediate sense. No meat, no eggs, no milk or vegetables. It looked like the refrigerator someone would leave behind after they moved, if they didn't have room to pack their condiments. A jar of pickles sat on the top shelf, only one spear left inside it.

And at the bottom of the refrigerator door, a large bottle of chilled wine.

I didn't know anything about wine. Charlie drank beer, sometimes, but I had never seen him drunk. Renee had wine at her wedding and on special occasions, but it took hardly any to make her giddy, she did not regularly drink. The wine in the refrigerator was in a glass bottle, a pale shade of pink. The label said 'White Zinfandel'.

I found the corkscrew in a drawer and opened the bottle. I drank straight from the bottle, choking down the first swallow. The bottle was heavy and cold, and wine was more bitter than I'd expected. After the first few swigs, though, it began to taste good to me.

I walked out into the living room again, heading toward the elegant stairway that opened into the large room. I took the wine with me.

Upstairs, I opened door after door in the hall. I wanted to see every room. The time I'd spent here over the summer had normally been in Edward's room or the family area, I'd never seen the rooms his brothers and sisters had. I knew that they each had a private room as well as a room they shared with their partner, so they would have privacy to do what they were interested in without disturbing the others.

Jasper's room was the first I went into. It didn't look like a room that had been moved out of, it looked like a room that had been left for a weekend. There were tall, empty easels against the wall, one of which had a broad, blank canvas on it. I hadn't known that Jasper painted, but his art supplies were carefully arranged on a nearby table, which had dark smears of wayward paint on the surface. On the table was a stack of detailed sketches. He was clearly very talented. I looked through them all. Portraits of his new family, and drawings of what I presumed to be his human family. The loving way that he shaded and laid out the scenes from his mortal life made me want to cry. I moved on.

The next room, of course, was Alice's. It was obvious that it belonged to her when I entered. Several sewing machines were placed throughout the room, framed by long bolts of fabric in every color and pattern and texture. She had her own sort of artistic flair, with her fashion drawings still pinned up to the walls and bulletin boards. Dark, heavy strokes that laid out the design of each outfit, with pale watercolor used to identify what kind of fabric would be used. They were bold and exciting, and a half-finished dress was pinned to a dummy at the end of the room. She had hung photos torn from magazines along the opposite wall, and I could see some of the things that inspired her own drawings.

I walked past the one room I couldn't bear to go into, going up the flight of stairs to reach Rosalie and Emmett's rooms. Emmett's room surprised me, though I suppose it shouldn't have. I'd expected to see guns, quite honestly. I knew that he'd been an outlaw in the old west, and I'd thought that would be revealed by his private room. It was silly, really. The other rooms all held the modern interests of their occupants. Jasper had been a soldier, Alice had been in an asylum. Their rooms revealed none of that. Nor did Emmett's room have much, if anything, from his previous life.

Inside was a large flatscreen television and a number of chairs surrounding it. Several video game consoles sat on the floor, one controller still discarded on the cushion of the chair in front of it. Clothes were discarded haphazardly around the room, and a big stereo was pushed against the back wall. It looked like any teen boy's bedroom.

I slumped to the floor outside of Rosalie's room. I'd lost my steam, and I sat there, crying quietly and drinking from the bottle in my hand. I had never been drunk before, but I was certain that I was, now. The room spun and I closed my eyes, letting it spin me.

I don't know how long I sat there for. I don't think I actually went to sleep, but I was certainly oblivious enough when someone shook me by the shoulder. I gasped, my eyes opening. The bottle was on the floor next to me, a large puddle surrounding it and beginning to soak into my jeans. I blinked blearily at the beautiful face in front of me.

"Bella," her voice was a breathy sigh, as if she were disappointed but not too surprised. Her blond hair fell around her angel's face, and I rubbed my arm against my face.

"Rosalie?" I asked. "How… what are you doing here?"

"I should be asking you that," she said. Her voice was like music to me, and my heart wrenched as it brought back memories of Edward.

I was suddenly afraid. Would she call my father? The police? What had I done?

"How did you know I was here?" I asked.

"You set off the silent alarm." Rosalie answered. "Come on, let's go downstairs. I'll make you some coffee."

She helped me navigate the stairway, and before I knew it we were sitting in the brightly-lit kitchen. I could smell the coffee brewing, and I noticed that Rosalie was putting pasta on to boil. For me.

"I didn't plan to come here…" I said woozily, trying not to let on how intoxicated I really was. I didn't fool her.

"I'm sure you didn't." She said. "But here you are. And you need to sober up before I take you home. Charlie would lose his head if he saw you like this."

"I just, I. I had to know."

"Know what?" Rosalie poured a cup of coffee for me, adding sugar and powdered creamer. She placed it in front of me, and I warmed my hands against the mug for a moment before taking the first sip. Even just a little coffee seemed to wake me up some.

"I had to know if you all could really just leave everything behind… if it really meant nothing to you."

Rosalie sat across from me, looking at me over the table. She had a thoughtful expression on her face. "We didn't leave everything behind, Bella." She said.

"All the rooms, they're all still full of your things… nothing changed."

"You never saw our rooms before, though." She said. "And I'm assuming by what you just said that you didn't go into Edward's room at all. I promise you that the very important things were taken with us. All that was left are the things that can be replaced, that don't matter."

Her words opened up the wound in my heart that I'd been waiting to heal for what seemed like years. "Like me." I said.

Rosalie frowned, her fingers coming to her lips as she looked at me. I looked away. I couldn't bear to witness her pity, no matter how terrible a condition I was currently in.

"It's not like that, Bella." She said. "We didn't leave because of you."

"He – he said – "

"He said what he needed to, to keep you from coming after us. But the reason was more complicated than that."

"Right."

She stood, putting the pasta on a plate and adding butter and pepper to it. She placed the simple food in front of me, handing me a fork.

"Bella, we left because of Edward. He did something." Rosalie said. I looked up sharply, feeling more lucid.

"What did he do?" I asked.

"You know part of it," she said. "Last spring, when James caught you. Edward drank a bag of blood because he thought he would need it to rescue you."

"I know." I said bitterly. I didn't want to remember what had happened before Edward had changed his mind about me. It was too hard.

"You think he's strong, stronger than he is." She continued. "You think he's invincible. But he's not. A relapse like that… after so long without human blood… he struggled with it. He made some mistakes. We didn't know how bad it had gotten until he disappeared,"

"What mistakes?"

She bit her lip, a surprisingly human mannerism. I felt a rush of concern and confusion. What had Edward done?

"He killed someone." She said.

My heart seemed to stop, and then start again in double time, hammering so hard that I could feel my own pulse in my ears, my fingers, my stomach.

"At the hospital." Rosalie said. "A man. I don't know, he was in a coma, or braindead… I'm not sure of the difference. Edward was visiting Carlisle, and he got so hungry, he says he needed to feed, to find _someone_. The man was only alive because of machines, he wasn't really…" she paused. "But Edward fed from him. And he died."

I spoke, my own voice sounding alien to me. "What did Carlisle do?" I asked.

"He didn't realize until later. Edward covered it up so well, the hospital thought it was a natural death, it wasn't until Carlisle reviewed the autopsy that he knew what had really happened. That was the day after you were hurt."

My ears were ringing.

"And it got worse, after that. He tried to get out of the city, but on the edge of town he came across a transient. He couldn't help himself, with blood still fresh in his mouth. He fed on him, too. But he was able to stop, that time. Our kind, though… our kind of vampire… it's very easy to turn someone. One bite is all it takes. For a person to survive a feeding, they are turned. The transient fled."

"Edward made a new vampire." I stated.

"Not just one, Bella." She said. I held my fork above my plate, food the farthest thing from my thoughts. I'd only drunk about half the cup of coffee, but the conversation had sobered me some. Adrenaline seemed to wash away the haze.

"How many?"

"Seven." She said.

I didn't respond.

"And two more that were killed. One of them was a prowler, trying to break into a home in the retirement community a couple miles from here. The other was a mugger who had attacked a young man on the street. Edward wasn't certain if he'd started feeding while the young man was still there, if he'd seen anything or not. The frenzy is like that, sometimes. It takes you over completely. He couldn't stop himself."

"The people he turned… what happened to them?" I asked.

"We were able to find some of them." Rosalie said. "Two teen boys, a woman, and a man. Sam, Robby, Annie and Randall."

"The others…" I began. "The killings in Seattle, the murders,"

"We believe they're because of Edward." Rosalie said softly. "Three newborns got away, and at that time it's nearly impossible to control the thirst. They're probably reproducing, too."

"It sounds like it's always impossible for you – you _people_ – to control your thirst," I said, my tone harsh.

"He tried, Bella. He didn't mean to do it."

"But he still did it!" I snapped. She nodded her head.

"I know," she said. "And so does he. It's why we left."

"So what he said to me..?"

Rosalie shook her head. "I don't know what he said to you, exactly, except that you broke up. None of us tried to influence what he'd say to you. I have to believe that he told you the truth."

"He said he changed his mind," I sighed. "But I knew – I _knew_ – it couldn't be the truth!"

"How can you know that?" She asked gently.

"What we had was real." I ground out. I was flooded with confusing emotions. Anger, regret, despair, and a seed of out-of-place hope, hope that disgusted me.

"Not if he could just change his mind." She said.

It made me angry that she could sit there, looking so beautiful, so put-together, so _composed_ while she shattered me all over again. I tossed down the rest of my coffee and turned to the plate, eating as quickly as I could.

"I want to go home now." I said, when I finished.

She nodded, and led the way to my truck. She wouldn't let me drive, and we spent the ride home in tense, cold silence.

"Bella, I'd like to call you tomorrow," Rosalie said when we sat in my driveway. My father wouldn't be home for a while, still, and I planned to claim I wasn't feeling well. I needed to sleep. "Would that be alright?"

"Do whatever you want, Rosalie." I said flatly. By the time I got to my front door, she had vanished.


	7. Chapter 7: Support

**7. SUPPORT**

My phone buzzed at 6 AM. I jerked awake, disoriented for a moment. I felt much better than the previous evening, during which I'd vomited once, slept several hours, and then managed to eat some toast with jam. I felt more or less normal, now, and was grateful I didn't have a hangover. I'd never been drunk before and never had a hangover, but if the wheeling dizziness and intense nausea from the night before was any indication, they could be pretty terrible.

I remembered most of the previous afternoon. Going to the Cullen house, drinking the wine, being rescued by Rosalie. I remembered what she said about Edward. What Edward had done. But the memories were mostly hazy, thin ideas that weren't as detailed as they should have been.

I sat up, taking a long drink from the glass of water that sat next to my bed, and answered the phone.

"Hello?" I asked groggily. Who would call so early?

"How are you feeling?" With sudden clarity I remembered Rosalie asking if she could call me. I should have told her 'no'.

"Better." I said. I wasn't sure what to say, or why she even wanted to talk to me. "Thanks for driving me home," I said grudgingly. "And, you know… telling me what was going on."

"You're welcome." Her lovely voice responded. "I think you deserve to know the situation. It affects you. I don't think any of us realized how much."

I knew she was now talking less about the events in Seattle, which did affect me (and my father, which worried me), and talking more about Edward's absence. I didn't want to talk about Edward.

"Yeah." I said.

"I know what it feels like, Bella."

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"I'm talking about having your heart broken. Being disappointed, and hurt… if you ever want to talk about it, you can talk to me."

"What do you care, Rosalie?" I demanded. "None of you have been willing to talk to me. Alice practically told me to piss off, and I actually thought she was my friend. You've never been my friend before, but now all the sudden you want to share our feelings? What the hell are you getting at, here?"

There was a long silence. I'd never imagined I would be able to make Rosalie speechless, but it appeared I had.

"Listen, Bella," Rosalie said, her voice soft. "When we left, Edward thought all of us should cut off contact. He wanted it to be a clean break. But when I saw you, last night… it struck me as unfair. And I'm sure it hurts your pride, but I really felt bad for you. What Edward said to you, how he left, it was too harsh. He's my brother and I love him, but that doesn't mean I can't see that he was wrong this time. I just want to give you some support."

"I have to go to school." I said, to keep her from saying anything more. It was too hard to hear her voice. I hung up.

…

Jacob was waiting for me in his garage. My chest seemed to relax as soon as I saw him, making it easier to breathe. My preoccupation with the Cullens that had been triggered by my stupid decisions and the resulting contact with Rosalie had been on my mind all day, and it had been a constant struggle throughout my classes to keep my head above water. Angela seemed to understand that I was having a bad day, and was especially kind to me throughout lunch.

I'd almost canceled on Jacob, because I felt so tired, but I wanted too badly to see him. And I was glad to have come to La Push. Every time I saw Jacob's face, I became more aware of how powerful his influence was on my mood.

"Hey, Bella," he called as he saw me climbing out of my truck.

I smiled in relief. "Hey, Jacob." I waved at Billy, who was looking out the window, before moving past the front of the Black house to the garage where Jacob already was.

"Let's get to work," Jacob said in an eager voice.

I laughed, though it was weaker than what had become usual for me. "You seriously aren't sick of me yet?" I wondered. He had to be starting to question how desperate I was for company.

"Nope, not yet."

"Well, let me know when I start getting on your nerves. I don't want to be a pain."

"Okay," he laughed, a throaty sound that warmed me from the inside. "I wouldn't hold your breath for that, though."

When I shifted around the Volkswagen, I was shocked to see the red bike standing up, looking like a motorcycle rather than a pile of jagged metal.

"Jake, you're amazing," I breathed.

He laughed again. "I get obsessive when I have a project," he shrugged. "If I had any brains I'd drag it out more."

I blinked. "Why?"

He looked down, pausing for so long that I wondered if he hadn't heard my question. Finally, he asked me, "Bella, if I told you that I couldn't fix these bikes, what would you say?"

I didn't answer right away, either, and he glanced up to check my expression. I couldn't believe he was doubting my feelings about him, rather than the other way around. I had so little to offer, and he had become almost everything to me. Had I done something to make him think he wasn't very important to me? He was normally so confident, comfortable in his skin, and I was a neurotic mess.

"I would say… that's too bad, but I'll bet we could figure out something else to do. If we got really desperate, we could even do homework."

Jacob smiled, his shoulders relaxing. He sat down next to the bike and picked up a wrench. "So you think you'll still come over when I'm done, then?"

I gave him a puzzled smile. "As long as you'll let me come over, I'm going to be here. Probably even after that. You'll have to come at me with a weapon to get rid of me."

"Hoping to see Quil again?" he teased. Quil had taken a shine to me when we'd met; he was slightly shorter than Jacob but much burlier, with very short hair and a handsome, cocky face. His swagger reminded me of Mike, though he was less poetic and dramatic with his flirtations, opting instead for frank innuendos.

"You caught me."

Jacob chuckled. "You really like spending time with me?"

"Of course!" I said. He smiled at my insistent tone. "I'll prove it. I have to work tomorrow, but we'll do something nonmechanical after that."

"Like what?"

"I have no idea," I said. I suddenly wanted to make sure he didn't think this was a date. I wasn't ready for that. "We can go to my place so you won't be tempted by the bikes. You could bring your schoolwork – you have to be getting behind, because I know I am."

"Homework might be a good idea." He made a face, and I wondered how much he was leaving undone to be with me.

"We'll have to start being responsible occasionally, or Billy and my dad aren't going to be so easygoing about this." I gestured toward the two of us. He beamed, apparently liking the way I refered to us as a single entity.

"Homework once a week?" He suggested.

"Maybe we'd better go with twice."

I sighed heavily, but reached into a paper grocery sack and pulled out two cans of soda. He cracked one open and handed it to me, opening a second for himself and holding it up ceremoniously.

"Here's to responsibility." He toasted. "Twice a week."

"And frivolity every day in between."

He grinned and touched his can to mine.

…

The next night, Charlie didn't seem the least bit surprised to find Jacob and I sprawled across the living room floor with our books scattered around us. I guessed that he and Billy were talking behind our backs.

"Hey, kids," he said, his eyes straying to the kitchen. The smell of the lasagna I'd spent the afternoon making wafted down the hall. Jacob had spent that time acting as my helper, surprisingly willing to get his hands dirty and follow my instructions, something I'd started to think was something men couldn't manage. It may have been partly because he was able to occasionally sample, but Jacob seemed to actually enjoy cooking with me. He grudgingly added another year to my negotiable age for being a good cook.

Jacob stayed for dinner, and took a plate home for Billy. We both were sorry to see the other go, though I couldn't help but think it was different for me than for him. The closer we got, the more I reasoned that I should end things somehow, protect Jacob from me. I was damaged, and I was afraid of being hurt again. Jacob had never been with anyone before, and he didn't know what it entailed. I didn't want to let him down, but I couldn't seem to prevent my feelings for him from growing.

Friday was the garage, and Saturday, after work, was homework again. My dad felt secure enough in my sanity to spend the day fishing with Harry. When he got back, Jake and I were all done – feeling very sensible and mature about it, too – and watching _Monster Garage_ on the Discovery Channel.

"I probably ought to go," Jacob sighed. "It's later than I thought."

"Okay," I grumbled. "I'll take you home."

He laughed at my expression, seeming pleased that I didn't want him to go.

"Tomorrow, back to work," I said as soon as we were safe in the truck. "What time should I come up?"

He tried to conceal a new excitement in his smile, but I could tell it was there. "I'll call you first, okay?"

I blinked, confused. "Sure," I said, wondering what was up. His smile widened.

…

That night, Tyler and Mike both called me just to talk. It was strange, suddenly having my friends back in my life after being alone for so long. I knew they'd only stopped calling because of how I'd been – I had rejected them over and over again until they had given up – but they seemed so willing to forgive me. Mike was back to his usual flirtatious self, though he knew I wasn't interested in dating. Most of our conversations consisted of joking around about nothing of any real importance.

Tyler was different, he was so genuine and honest with me. He talked frankly about how he'd worried over me while I was unwell, and that he'd tried to break through to me a few times but it hadn't seemed to do any good. He told me how hopeless he'd felt at my erratic and withdrawn behavior. He admitted to talking to his parents about it, and that their eventual advice was that I had to take care of myself, and that he couldn't worry himself to death over me.

"I'm sorry, Tyler, really. I can't believe I acted that way, it was selfish,"

"No, no, Bella. Don't get me wrong, I'm not mad at you. I don't want you to apologize, and I don't think you're selfish. You can't help how you feel. I'm just sorry that he hurt you so badly," he said. "It _was_ because of him, wasn't it? Edward Cullen…"

"Yes," I answered, my stomach turning at the name. "Without warning. He started acting strangely, not talking to me, and then he disappeared for days. Even his family didn't know where he was, and I was so worried. Then when he came back, he wouldn't talk to me. He just ended it… and the same day, his whole family left town."

"He must be crazy." Tyler said, and something in his tone both reassured me and made me wary. It was the way someone would reassure a person they wanted to be with.

I liked Tyler – too much, perhaps – and I approached my friendship with him the way I approached mine with Jacob. I hadn't been repairing my relationship with Tyler for nearly so long, of course, so I hadn't been worried yet. But I couldn't let either of them come after me, romantically. I needed to learn to stand alone.

"Maybe." I said at last. "I can't describe what it felt like. The way it happened, with him disappearing, and then just ending it, with no explanation. And his whole family leaving town. I've never felt like that, before. It was like his entire family rejected me at once. It was just… it was like being told I wasn't good enough for any of them. Like I was just trash to them. I don't know."

"It was degrading," Tyler suggested.

"Exactly." I said. "It messed me up. I know a lot of people were worried about me, but I was just such a total wreck that it took me a long time to start to recover. I didn't even see what was happening to me, my dad finally had to sit me down and make me face it."

"No one has the right to make you feel that way." Tyler said. I didn't say anything. "If he comes back, I'll punch him in the groin for you."

I laughed abruptly, and couldn't stop for several seconds.

"Aren't you sweet!" I said sarcastically, when I'd gotten control of myself. I took a breath. "He won't come back." I added, more seriously.

"He'd better not." Tyler said. "I wouldn't be the only one waiting to punch him in his pretty face."

…

I laid in bed that night, trying to push away my feelings about the boys. I didn't know what to do about them. I knew that Jacob and Tyler both cared about me, and both of them wanted me to be happy. I just didn't know if I could be with someone other than Edward. I didn't want to lead them on, not when my heart might not be able to love in that same way again.

I had no one to talk to about it. Jessica? No, she would probably start talking about Mike. I loved Jess as much as any of my friends, but she tended to pull the conversation back to herself. I normally didn't mind that, I would rather others talk about themselves than for me to have to talk about myself, but today I needed some real counseling. I supposed I could talk to Angela, but she was more of a passive listener. I didn't think she would be able to talk me through it. So who?

I had an idea, then. It was stupid, probably, and made no sense, but I decided to act on it, anyway. Maybe it would come to nothing, maybe it was just a condescending lie to make me feel better, but maybe she could actually help me.

I called Rosalie.

"Bella?"

I took a breath, looking up at the dark ceiling of my room. "Hey," I said. I wasn't sure how to begin. "I'm sorry for hanging up on you, the other day. I was still upset."

"It's alright," she said. She sounded puzzled, but not angry.

"You said you knew what it was like to be heartbroken," I said.

"Yes." But she didn't offer the story.

"I feel weird talking to you about all this," I continued, avoiding the meat of what I wanted to talk about. "I mean, he's your brother."

"It's alright, I won't get offended. I'm sure I want to smack him as often as anyone he's not related to, maybe more."

I gave her a vague chuckle, sitting quietly for a moment before continuing. "When he left… when you all left… it messed me up."

"I know – " she began.

"No, you don't." I said. "You don't know. When you saw me the other night, that was after weeks of recovering. I spent months here like a zombie. You can't imagine, Rosalie. All of you leaving at once? Like I was so horrible, so worthless, that you _all_ couldn't stand to be near me? I can't really say anything about what you guys intended, or what the rest of you wanted Edward to do. All I can speak to is what happened to me afterward. I'm still dealing with what happened, every day, and it's really hard. He made me believe that he loved me, that we would always be together, and then he just threw me away like I was nothing."

"I wish I could apologize for him, Bella, but I won't do him that kind of favor." Her tone was much harsher than I had expected, and I realized she meant it. She really was angry with Edward for treating me the way he had.

"I don't want you doing him that kind of favor," I said. "You didn't make him do it. And if he really could just change his mind about loving me, it couldn't have been real to begin with."

"It's hard to accept something like that, though. When you really believed it was true."

"Exactly." I said. I sighed, turning my eyes to the stars outside my window. "You said you knew about heartbreak," I continued. "Will you tell me about it? You're the only one in the family whose story I don't know. Edward wouldn't tell me without your permission, and you always seemed so distant to me."

Rosalie didn't say anything for a long moment. "I guess that love is a touchy subject for me," she said at last. "It sounds strange. Everyone thinks they care about love, at least in theory, but they don't. They don't always appreciate it. The way Edward discarded you offends me, probably because of my own experience as a human."

"What happened?"

She paused again. "I grew up on the frontier. My father had moved to Kentucky in 1792, a year after both of his brothers were killed in the Northwest Indian War. They were his only brothers and he looked up to them tremendously. I think he moved in hope of understanding what his brothers' last days had been like, but he never had the courage to actually talk to any of the people that lived in our town about their experiences during the wars with Indians. He was a very timid man, cripplingly shy. But he was wealthy and handsome, so he managed to get married to my mother. Eleven years after he moved to the frontier, I was born. I want you to understand the way society was, then. The way my family shaped me…"

I was consumed with curiosity. I wanted to talk to her about my current problems, but that would have to wait. Somehow, I believed that by listening to her story, I would understand my own life better. "Yeah?" I prompted.

"I was actually my parents' ninth child, but two had died in infancy and three more died after me. Having children was dangerous in those days, for both mother and child, and with each pregnancy I was more worried for my mother's sake. My strongest memories from childhood were about my father. He was extremely controlling, and obsessive. He was desperately afraid of Indians, he just absolutely hated them. He blamed the Indians for his brothers' deaths, of course, nearly everyone felt that way at the time. But I can't recall a time when he even managed to speak to a native. It was only at home, where he felt powerful, that he would go on his tirades. Normally his rants were racist in nature, but sometimes he directed his hatred instead toward women. He thought nothing of women at all."

"Did he hurt you?" I asked.

"Oh, not physically, if that's what you mean. And very honestly, all of us in the family kind of understood that my father was hateful because he felt weak in his life. He took his feelings of inadequacy out on us, but we all knew it was just words with no truth to them. But it's strange, when you're young. You may rebel against your parents' efforts to control you, but most of the time you don't much question their basic beliefs. I never questioned my father's racism, it was just what people thought. It was very easy to be racist then. Society reinforced those beliefs at every turn, and it was much more difficult to believe the opposite. I don't want to suggest that everyone was racist, then, because there's never a belief that every person in a group agrees with. But I didn't know anyone who didn't speak in that way about Indians.

"And so too did the culture at large believe that women were inferior, not to be trusted or listened to. That we were weak in both will and body. It's silly, because within our own groups we talked about men as if we were the ones in control. But I think we believed it. We'd been taught it was true until we believed, ourselves, that we were not as worthy of respect as men. And for what reason? I'm not sure anymore. Even then, the arguments presented were easily disproved, but most women never tried to. In truth, whenever my friends or sisters began talking too seriously about how silly men were, I thought they were daft and presumptuous. It seemed stupid to bother with something like that. It felt as if women had always been the weaker sex, and men had always been the stronger. And I confess that I cared very little about societal issues. I thought politics and war, and any issues of equality or justice were the concerns of men, and my parents supported that sentiment."

"If all women felt that way, though, we'd never be where we are today." I said softly.

"I know," Rosalie said. "We are very fortunate that there have been women throughout history that have broken free of that belief system. But I was not one of those women. I am ashamed to admit that it also took me much longer than it should have to overcome the racist beliefs I held in my life. When I think back on them now, I'm mortified. They were absurd to begin with, and it took me far too long to see that." Her voice lowered in shame.

"But you did overcome them, didn't you?" I was thinking of Jacob. Who could hate Jacob? And for something as arbitrary as skin color… I felt a knot in my stomach at the very thought of it.

"Yes, eventually. I had to work very hard at it for a very long time. Things like that hook into your mind, and so many times you think you've finally gotten rid of them just to discover that the roots are still there. It's as if I still expected my father to be watching me, to be listing dates and evidence to support his racism. There were times I'd even hear his voice in my head, as if he were there beside me. He never would have allowed me to marry someone like Emmett, who's half Californio."

I wanted to ask what 'Californio' meant, but she continued before I could.

"And as to marriage, which is the heart of my story… when I was fourteen, I began to be visited by suitors. At first I quite enjoyed it. Though my mother and sisters called me beautiful and told me how people envied my hair, or my lips, or my eyes… they didn't convince me of it. I didn't accept it until men began to send me letters and flowers. So much of my self-worth was tied up in men. We women had our own separate social world, but a man's world was the one that mattered. My father was very firm on that subject…he was such a meek individual in public, usually. I think he thought that convincing all of us in his family that a man was powerful and a woman was his servant, that it would reduce his embarrassment over himself. As if by teaching us to live how he could not, it could change who he was. As the years moved on, he got harder and harder on us about behaving like proper men and women.

"By the time I was sixteen, several boys had caught my eye. I spoke to my friends only about the virtues of each man vying for my hand. I must have bored my sisters to death! Any time a friend spoke more about her own interests than about the men courting her, if she did not seem to seriously be working toward marriage and family, I thought her to be childish and stupid."

"That's crazy," I said.

"I know," Rosalie gave a vague laugh. "I can see now that the opposite was true. Being so absorbed in myself, that was the childish thing. But that's who I was, then. And as time went on, and I began to narrow my choices, my father became more controlling than ever. My mother spent all of her time in the kitchen or at the market to avoid him. Our every conversation seemed to involve him calling me fickle and soft-minded. He told me again and again that romantic love was a fiction, that a match should be based on logic and common values. I knew which man he wanted me to choose. His name was Royce, he was very handsome and very wealthy. His family owned a plantation in Louisiana, but he had come to Kentucky to investigate the fur trade, which was very profitable.

"I wasn't certain, though. Royce wanted me to live with his mother in Louisiana. I didn't want to move, I knew nothing of southern women and I was afraid the people there would not like me. I also knew that he planned on traveling for work, leaving me alone with his family for months at a time. I was afraid to live that way, and I had little interest in Royce aside from physical attraction. But my father put no value in my feelings, so I didn't bring that point up very often."

"He wanted you to marry a stranger? I can't believe he'd just send you off like that," I said.

"He wanted the money," Rosalie said frankly. "But there was another man. Joshua Martinson was a young man in town, the brother of my best friend Vera. We had known each other for all our lives, but I hadn't come to know him well until he began sending me letters. He wrote me the loveliest letters, Bella!"

Her voice grew wistful and affectionate, something I hadn't heard from Rosalie before. "He'd say, 'since we were young you have had my whole heart'. He said, 'I feel we are two halves of one whole, twain, two bodies animated by one soul and the Lord has given us to each other'."

It was clear she'd read this boy's letters so many times that she had them memorized. It was surprising to see this side of her.

"He was such a gentle and passionate man. He loved me wholly, and as we became closer I began to love him, too. He was not so handsome as most of my suitors, certainly not as handsome as Royce, but with every passing day he seemed to get more beautiful to me. I think it is true that love is blind. My friends couldn't understand why I continued to speak with him, because he had no real money and he had made remarks before about the wealthy in our town, calling them foolish and frivolous. He was rather serious-minded, too, compared to the exuberant personality that Royce had.

"All these things were repeated to me by my sisters, and then my mother, and at last my father. He forbade me to pursue a relationship with Joshua. Among the other suitors that I was allowed, Royce was the obvious choice. I did not have feelings for any of them but Joshua, and Royce's fortune seemed very important to my father. So, I agreed."

"How can you marry someone you don't even love?" I asked. I couldn't imagine choosing someone else, not if I'd had feelings for someone like she'd had for Joshua. It must have broken her heart, but that didn't seem to be the end of the story.

"I had to," she said. "It was the only choice I was given. I married Royce at home, and immediately afterward he took me with him to Louisiana. The wedding was beautiful. Royce was all courtliness, such a gentleman. But my father had told him to keep me away from Joshua, without my knowing. I wanted to see Joshua before I left, I wanted to explain myself. I was unable to. When Joshua came to congratulate me, Royce broke his nose. I was horrified and began to cry, but Royce was not at all concerned about me. He made some remark to my father about me being hysterical, and my father took me away. I later learned that Royce challenged Joshua to a duel, after Joshua said he was sorry to see me marry such a savage. It deeply offended Royce, he spoke of it for days. Joshua refused to fight him, of course, he had always been a nonviolent man. I could see how it disappointed Royce – he was used to the satisfaction of a fight to relieve his anger – and Joshua had failed to provide him that outlet."

"He sounds like a jerk," I said.

"Yes." Rosalie agreed. "We spent two weeks together in his house in Louisiana. I think he enjoyed it more than I did. He seemed to believe that women were made to gratify a man's appetite, and nothing more. He made no attempt to reciprocate any aspect of our relationship. He gave me rules to follow as if I were his daughter, rather than his wife. He kept me on a small allowance and forbade me from being alone with any other men. I badly missed my sisters, which he mocked me for. And he laughed at the way I interacted with the slaves."

I sucked in a breath at the word. Slaves. It put her lifetime into a context I had failed to provide on my own.

"I was not at all comfortable giving them instructions, which seemed to amuse him, and he ordered me to do it again and again. I worried that they would dislike me, and I often cried when he would strike them. I was not happy there at all, even though his mother and sister were quite lovely. Very opposite to Royce himself. They did everything they could to make me happy, but it was impossible. After two weeks, Royce tired of my company and left for work. Even though I had come to deeply dislike him, I was lonely by myself. His mother and sister were rarely with me after Royce left, returning to their own lives."

"That's awful."

"Until one day…" Rosalie took a breath. "Joshua appeared on our front step. He still had bruising from where his nose had been broken, but it was perhaps the sweetest sight I'd had since arriving in Louisiana. I invited him in, ignoring the kitchen girl's warnings about Royce forbidding me from being alone with men. I suppose she was right, I shouldn't have allowed our affair. But I loved Joshua, and after the treatment I'd received, I could not resist him any longer. I gave myself to him completely. He was everything that Royce was not. He made me feel beautiful, he made me feel worthy. He made me his equal and never for one moment did I doubt our love. Not once. He sacrificed having a wife of his own, of having children, and he did that for me. Because I was trapped. We often spoke of running away together, but it always seemed premature. We had no money to survive on."

"Maybe you could have been alright, anyway." I said. "Maybe you could have lived on the land, or found jobs in the East somewhere,"

"I'm sure we could have, now." Rosalie said, with clear sadness. "But we were young and foolish. We'd never lived outside our own little bubble, and we had no idea of what the country had to offer. We should have gone. We should have found a way. Somehow, it always seemed like we would have more time… for almost five years, whenever Royce would leave, Joshua would take his place. And Royce was almost always gone."

"Royce never suspected?"

"After a time…" Rosalie said. "When I was twenty-one, things got very bad. Royce had heard rumors of my infidelity, which I didn't know. He surprised us. I don't know why he didn't have his pistol on him – it was clear that he had planned to catch us – but instead he seized a poker from the fireplace and thrust it into Joshua's chest, killing him."

My stomach dropped. I couldn't accept the horrifying turn that Rosalie's story had taken. It seemed like too much.

"I reached to Joshua, trying to help him – somehow – even though he was already dead. Royce grabbed me and forced himself on me, although I tried to fight him off, all the while with Joshua's body next to us. It was the worst thing I have ever experienced."

We were both silent for a long time. I didn't have the words to react, I had no idea how to respond. "Rosalie…" I finally began, without any idea where I'd go from there.

"For another year, I remained there. I had nowhere else to go. Royce had told my father what I'd done, and my family condemned me for it. I was trapped there with that monster, that murderer. He became more violent toward me every day, and after a while I didn't even bother to fight him. I just waited for it to end. Then, one evening, he lost control. He struck me around my head until I lost consciousness.

"I woke up in the woods some miles from our house. I'd been changed. I wandered for a time, disoriented by my new senses and thirst. I came across a slave girl, she looked younger than me, but she was a vampire. Her name was Martha. I never found out if she was the one who turned me… it seems likely, but without her confirming it I can't shake that hint of doubt. She told me to run deep into the woods and avoid people at all costs, until I controlled my thirst. At first I didn't quite understand what she meant, but I soon learned. She didn't stay with me."

"Did you feed from animals?"

"At first." Rosalie said. "I was on my own for many years. I fed from animals, and there are a few times where I came across people in the woods, but in those early years the frenzy took me over completely. I don't remember what happened. Perhaps I killed them, perhaps not, I don't know. When I discovered I had new strength, I began to look for information about Royce. I learned he had cut my ties with the world of the living, so I wouldn't have to do it. He'd claimed me missing, and suggested a slave named Jon had taken off with me. I assume he killed the slave also. When I found out about this, I went back to the house. I stayed in the darkness, observing him for any sign of guilt or regret. He showed none.

"I killed him.

"I wish I could say it hurt me to kill a man. I wish I could claim some level of remorse or human compassion for taking another life. But it didn't, and I can't claim that I experienced those things. I felt no qualms whatsoever. Only justice."

"He deserved it." I said with certainty. Hearing of the killings Edward had done, even though he'd discussed how it damaged him to kill the monsters of the human world, had bothered me slightly. But I'd forgiven that, at the time. Rosalie, however… she didn't need to be forgiven. "I can't even imagine anyone deserving it more." I added.

"I'm glad you think so." Rosalie said, and she sounded vaguely relieved. "I never regretted killing Royce. I did regret other things, many other things. Most especially I regretted accepting Joshua in the way I did. If I had resisted – sent him home, even pretended I didn't love him – he would have survived. He'd have found another to love, he may have had children. I can't bring myself to regret loving him back, but accepting him after I was married… I shouldn't have done it. It was Royce's fault he died, but I can't deny my role. But although I mourned him so, my love was transformed. Perhaps my reluctance to kill was because my grief was still so fresh when I had changed. I clung to my love for Joshua, even after being turned. Whenever I was tempted to feed from an undeserving host, I saw his face. He had the softest hair, tawny and fine. His nose was larger than would be considered handsome, but it gave him an earnest face. He looked intelligent. And his eyes, they were his most wonderful feature. They were blue like ice in the arctic, that shocking pure blue. Even though we _both_ were dead, I couldn't disappoint him. I couldn't let myself do things that would let him down, and I believed that he looked on me from heaven. I threw myself into activity to prevent myself from focusing on feeding. When you are a vampire, if you let it, feeding becomes absolutely everything."

I bit my lip, thinking of what Rosalie's face looked like right now. I could almost imagine her, my imagination painting her features in a look of love and sadness, an expression I'd never actually seen her display.

"What about Emmett?" I asked.

Rosalie gave a light, breathy laugh. "Emmett knows that we all bring with us the experiences of our lives," she said. "I do not judge him for his unwholesome history and he does not judge me for the love I had before him. My relationship with him is so different, anyway. He is a force of nature, you see. Joshua was… oh, tenderness, respect, and gentle love. Emmett is different. He's joy, boisterousness, he's frankness and indulgence and excitement. I love them both. It's hard to understand unless you've felt it, how you can love two people equally, but have love feel so different from one to the other."

I worked that thought over in my mind. It was exactly the kind of thing I needed to hear, but I didn't yet want to bring up the topic. It was hard to compare my troubles with what Rosalie had experienced; they seemed so inconsequential when held up next to murder and rape. They seemed so silly.

"How did you meet Emmett?" I asked, instead.

Rosalie laughed again, more fully this time. "Well, as I said, I chose to be as active as I could to prevent temptation. I've always been attracted to exhilaration. I started out with boats. I taught myself sailing, salvaging, and for many years I occupied myself with running tugboats and ferries. Then I went to ballooning – it is really incredible, floating above the world. Piloting has the same appeal. But it wasn't until I got interested in automobiles that I met Emmett. We met at an auto race. I immediately saw him for what he was, and he was more than happy to speak to me. He's a bit shameless in that way." She said. "A few weeks after we met, we actually went to France together. I'm sure his family was just floored by his sudden devotion to me, nearly a stranger to them. But in the states at that time, women were still forbidden to race, and in France I was permitted to compete."

"You were a racecar driver?" I couldn't reconcile the idea of Rosalie in a racing car with the way she'd always seemed to me at school.

"I never was able to make a true name for myself, of course. I was only able to participate when weather permitted. It's sunny enough anywhere, unpredictably enough, that I had to withdraw from a lot of key races. But racing is just wonderful, Bella, it's like nothing else. It gives you the feeling of being strong and in control, of being _fast_. Right now Emmett and I are doing motocross – you can't believe the rush! And the protective gear covers us enough that we can compete on sunny days, too."

"I can't believe you're doing motocross." I said. "Weirdly, my friend Jacob and I are rebuilding some old bikes right now. Not quite the same, but still."

"Really?" Rosalie seemed just as stunned at that as I had been when she'd told me about her own racing interests. "That's great, Bella! Oh, just wait. It's such fun."

"I'd never be able to compete with you, though, I'm sure," I said, smiling slightly to myself.

"That's just it, though… our reflexes give us a slight advantage, but really it comes down to the skill of the rider. It's not like a footrace where humans are physically unable to compete with us. It's a real challenge, that's the best part."

"I guess," I said softly. "It's part of the reason I called, though. Jacob. And another boy, Tyler. Because I like them, especially Jacob. He makes me feel like… everything will get better. Tyler and I were good friends, before I… fell apart. Now we're starting to get to know each other again. And even though – even though Edward was so… you know. I just, I can't imagine being with anyone else. It scares me when I feel so good around the others. I don't know how to stop myself from wanting to be with them, and Jacob… he's two years younger, and he's never had a girlfriend. I'm afraid he wouldn't understand. I don't know what to do."

Rosalie paused. "If Jacob makes you feel like things will be better," she said. "Then you should let yourself feel that. Don't do anything you aren't comfortable doing, but don't be afraid, either. I know that it seems impossible to trust again, but don't distrust someone who hasn't given you a reason. Don't let someone who's gone control you. Don't let him win."

"He's your brother," I pointed out again, surprised once more at her willingness to discredit Edward.

"Which makes me even angrier." Rosalie said. "I can't believe he acted the way he did. I can't stand a man who acts like he has the right to treat a woman that way. I just can't. And he knows how I feel."

"You won't tell him we talked, will you?"

"Of course not. He doesn't deserve to know it. He's forfeited his rights to knowing what's going on with you."

"Thanks, Rosalie." I said, and I actually meant it. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but you really helped."

"I'm glad." Rosalie said. "Listen, you'd better go to bed. It's late, and you actually have to sleep."

"Okay. Goodbye."

"Take care, Bella."

I had the feeling that she wasn't planning to talk to me again. This was a one-time connection, rather than an actual friendship. But that was alright. She had reasons to keep her distance – I couldn't expect her to abandon her family even if she didn't approve of Edward's actions – and I wouldn't press it. If I needed help, I'd call her again. But unless that happened, I would let the Cullens go. Any continued contact would only prolong my link to the man that had destroyed me.

I fell asleep after the phone call ended. I woke up feeling refreshed.


	8. Chapter 8: Impact

**8. IMPACT**

I parked my truck off to the side of the Blacks' house, close to the trees. We had to be somewhere that would make it easier to sneak the bikes out, since Jacob's call had made it clear that they were ready for a test-drive. My hands shook as I bounded toward the shed, knowing Jacob would be waiting there with our treasures.

I laughed when I saw them; a ribbon tied around each of the handlebars, and Jacob standing proudly behind, his arms extended like a presenter on a game show. "Ready?" he asked in a low voice, his eyes sparkling.

"You know it." I said, trying to imagine myself on the motorcycle, trying to imagine the feeling of it.

"I know the perfect spot." Jacob said, loading the bikes carefully into the bed of my truck with apparent ease. "Somewhere no one will catch us."

At Jacob's instruction, I drove south of town. The dirt road wove in and out of the forest – sometimes there was nothing to see but trees, and then there would suddenly be a stark glimpse of the Pacific, dark grey under the hanging clouds. We were above the shore, on top of the cliffs that bordered the beach.

Jacob talked endlessly about finishing the bikes, though his descriptions were too technical for me to easily follow. Every once in a while I'd ask him what something meant, which would send him into a tangent that was both long and confusing. After a few times, I just let him talk, letting my gaze drift toward the ocean.

That was when I noticed four figures standing on a rocky ledge, much too close to the precipice. Despite the chill in the air today, they seemed to be wearing only shorts, which made me think they were men. As I watched, the broadest of them stepped toward the brink, and threw himself over the edge.

"Jacob!" I shouted, stomping on the break.

"What?!" Jacob's tone matched mine reflexively.

"Someone just jumped off the cliff! Why are they just standing there? We have to call someone!" I stopped the truck and started to crawl out, searching my pockets for my phone. My fingers shook and I blinked, wide-eyed toward the rocky area where the remaining men stood. They seemed to have heard my commotion and were looking in our direction.

Jacob's hands appeared on my shoulders, warm and gentle. He was trying to guide me back into the truck. "They're just cliff-diving, Bella," he said softly. "Come on, they're looking at us. They probably think we're nuts."

I allowed him to direct me back into my seat, and I didn't say anything for a long moment. "Cliff diving." I repeated.

"La Push doesn't have a mall, you know." His voice seemed strangely irritated. "Most of us jump from lower down, there's a ledge about halfway. Those guys are just showing off, it's dangerous to do it from there. Not to mention it's freezing, today."

"You do - do _that_?"

"Sure." He shrugged. "It's fun, you know. A rush."

I watched as the men on the cliff lost interest in the commotion they must have heard from me. Another of them was pacing the edge, preparing to jump. I'd never witnessed anything so reckless in all my life.

I smiled. "Jake, you have to take me cliff diving."

Jacob gave a short laugh, shaking his head at my sudden change in opinion. "Not today. We have something else to do, remember? Something we've been working on for weeks?"

I gave him a guilty smile. "Right." I said. I pulled my seat belt on and we started down the road again. "So who were those guys? You know them?"

Jacob turned his eyes away from me, running his fingertips gently against the cool glass of the passenger side window. "Yeah, sort of." He said. "The kids have started calling them 'the La Push gang'."

"La Push has a gang?"

He laughed shortly. "Not like that. They're not criminals or anything. The opposite, actually, like hall monitors gone wild. There was this guy from up somewhere by the Makah rez, big guy, was selling meth to people round here. Sam Uley and his crew ran them off our land. They're all about _our land_ and _tribe pride_ and that. As if we don't all hear enough of it from the council."

Something about Jacob's tone was strange to me, as if he was trying to hide how much he disliked the group. "I thought you were pretty proud of your heritage," I said.

"I am," Jake said quickly. "No, it's just… I don't know. Embry says the council actually meets with Sam. It's weird. And Leah Clearwater said that they call themselves 'protectors' or something like that." His hands were tight fists, and his eyes were trained on the treeline as we drove.

"You don't like them," I said.

"Does it show?" He asked, giving me a vague grin.

"I guess they're not doing anything bad, though. They just sound a little presumptuous, you know, with the 'protectors' thing and all."

"Yeah, presumptuous, that's what it is. And they're always showing off. Like the cliff thing. They act like tough guys. I was hanging out at the store with Embry and Quil once, and Sam came by with his friends Jared and Paul. Quil said something, you know how he has a big mouth, and it pissed Paul off. His eyes got all dark and he sort of smiled with all these teeth, and it was actually really scary. I was sure he was going to attack Quil. But Sam put his hand on Paul, and I swear, it was like Sam was holding him back. Like a bad western!" He rubbed his hand against his jaw, his eyes far away. "You know, Sam's a pretty big guy. He's twenty. And Paul's just sixteen, shorter than me and not as beefy as Quil. I think any of us could take him. He didn't seem to think so, though."

"Tough guys," I agreed. "Isn't Sam a little old for that kind of thing? And hanging out with guys your age, that's kind of strange, isn't it?"

"Yeah. He was supposed to go to college, but he stayed. And no one gave him any crap about it, either. The whole council pitched a fit when my sister tuned down a partial scholarship and got married. But not Sam…" His face had shifted. He looked outraged.

"Jake, it sounds really strange, but… I don't see why you're taking it so personally."

His face was suddenly calm, and he turned to stare out the side window. "You missed the turn." He said.

"Thanks for the heads-up," I muttered as I managed a very wide U-turn, nearly hitting a tree.

"Sorry. I wasn't paying attention."

I said nothing, feeling as if I'd offended Jacob without meaning to. I shot a glance at his face, but he wasn't looking at me. "You can stop anywhere along here."

I pulled over and cut the engine. My ears rang as silence took the place of the roar of the truck. We both got out, and Jacob headed around to get the bikes. I could tell he was still bothered by our discussion, and I knew I'd somehow hit a nerve.

He smiled halfheartedly as he pushed the red bike to my side. "Happy belated birthday. Are you ready for this?"

I grinned broadly back at him. "Are you kidding? Absolutely." But my heart was beating against my ears. The bike suddenly looked enormous and unconquerable. I tried not to let on, but Jacob could read me so easily.

"We'll take it slow," he promised. I gingerly leaned the motorcycle against the truck's fender while he went to get his.

"Jake," I hesitated as he returned.

"Yeah?"

"What's really bothering you? About the Sam thing, I mean. Is there something else?"

He looked at the dirt and kicked his shoe against the front tire of his bike again and again, like he was keeping time. Finally, he sighed. "It's just… the way they treat me. It creeps me out." The words started to tumble out of him, like he hadn't shared his feelings with anyone and was relieved to finally be able to talk about it. "You know, the council is supposed to be made up of equals, but if there was a leader it would be my dad. It took me a long time to figure out why people treat him the way they do, like his opinion counts most. It's because of his father and his father's father. My great-grandpa was the last chief we had, and they still listen to Dad, maybe because of that. But I'm just like everyone else. Nobody has ever treated _me _special, until now."

"Sam treats you special?"

"Yeah." He turned troubled eyes towards me. "He looks at me like he's waiting for something. Like I'm going to join up with him someday. He pays more attention to me than anyone else on the reservation. Anytime he sees me, he comes over to talk to me. He never actually says anything important, just asks me how school's going, how my dad is, that sort of thing. But the way he looks at me, it's like he's trying to read my mind or something. And a lot of times, I feel almost like… like he didn't just run into me accidentally. It feels like he was actually looking for me. I hate it."

"Listen, you don't have to join anything. He can't force you to hang around with him." I said. I was concerned… Jacob was someone who had good instincts. I trusted his reactions, and even though I didn't know Sam, I couldn't distrust Jacob's feelings about him.

"I know." He said, his foot keeping its rhythm against the tire.

"There's more, isn't there?"

He shrugged. "It's just other stuff," he said. His eyebrows pulled upward, arching in worry. "It's Embry. He's been avoiding me lately."

"You've been hanging out with me a lot," I said, feeling suddenly selfish. Was I monopolizing him?

"No, that's not it. It's not just me – it's Quil, too. Everyone. Embry missed an entire week of school, but he was never home when we tried to visit. His Mom was weird when we asked about it, she just said he wasn't there, and then when we asked more questions she'd tell us to come back later. Quil and me went three or four times trying to get hold of him, just to talk to him. His Dad finally told us not to come back. He said Embry had mono, and that the doctor didn't want him to have visitors, because he was worried they would catch it. Quil and I said we didn't care if we caught it, we just wanted to say hello. Then he changed his story, he said that Embry's mono was so bad he was at his grandmother's house, because she has better central heating."

"That does sound weird."

"When he finally came back to school, he looked different. Edgy, you know, like he thought people were suspicious of him. And distracted. Like he couldn't pay attention to what you were saying for long enough to hold a conversation. Quil and I both tried to get him to tell us what was wrong, but he wouldn't talk to either one of us."

I bit my lip. Jacob was really frightened, and I didn't know what to say.

"Now, out of nowhere, Embry's hanging out with Sam. He was out on the cliffs, I saw him. And I mean, Paul used to trail him around the way Sam does to me. It really bugged him, he didn't want anything to do with them. Now he's their friend?"

"Have you talked to your dad about it?"

Jacob gave an empty laugh. "Yeah, that was helpful. 'It's nothing you need to worry about, Jacob. I know what's going on, I'll explain later.'"

I frowned. "That doesn't seem like him."

"It's not even the worst part." Jacob said. "Yesterday, Quil was missing all day. I called his house, and you know what his dad says?"

"What?"

"'Quil has mono. He can't take any calls.'"

We both stood in silence. I heard him take a shaky breath, and looked over to see his expression shift, as though he were about to cry. I threw my arms around him instinctively, wrapping them around his waist and pressing my face against his chest. He was so big, I felt like a child hugging an adult. "It'll be okay!" I promised. "If it gets worse, you can come and live with me and my dad. You can sleep on the couch and help me make dinner. And if all else fails, you and I can ride off into the sunset on our motorcycles!"

He chuckled, sounding as though he felt better. "Thanks, Bella." He said. It was strange, being so close to someone emotionally. Not since Edward. It was good to have a friend as warm as Jacob. "If this is how you're going to react, I'll freak out more often," he teased, his voice normal again. His fingers touched my hair, soft and tentative.

I pulled away with a scolding look, though my smile ruined any sternness I could have attempted. "It's hard to believe I'm two years older than you," I said. "You make me feel like a dwarf."

"You're like a little porcelain doll," he patted my head. I rolled my eyes, taking another step away.

"Are we going to ride or what?" I asked.

"You got it!"

…

"Okay, where's your clutch?"

I pointed to the lever on my left handlebar. Letting go of the grip was a mistake. The heavy bike wobbled underneath me, threatening to knock me sideways. I grabbed the handle again, trying to hold it straight.

"Jacob, it won't stay up," I said.

"It will when you're moving," he promised. "Now, where's your brake?"

"Behind my right foot."

"Wrong." He grabbed my right hand and curled my fingers around the lever over the throttle.

"But you said – "

"This is the brake you want. Don't use the back brake now, that's for when you know what you're doing."

"That doesn't sound right," I said. "Aren't they both important?"

"Just – forget the back brake, okay? Here – " he wrapped his hand around mine and made me squeeze the lever down. "That's how you brake. Don't forget." He squeezed my hand down again.

"Okay." I agreed.

"Throttle?" I twisted the right grip. "Gearshift?" I nudged it with my left calf. "Good. I think you've got all the parts down. Now you just have to get it moving."

"Uh huh," I said, my adrenaline rushing back. Would I be able to manage this, really? My stomach was twisting, and my voice sounded far away. My head was tingling. I tried to tell myself that fear was pointless, I'd already faced far more harrowing situations, and in comparison with something like James trying to kill me and my mother, or Edward leaving, why should anything frighten me now? I should be able to look a motorcycle in the face and laugh!

Unfortunately, I couldn't even chuckle at the moment.

I stared down the long stretch of road. It was bordered by thick misty green, and the road was sandy and damp. Was this really the best surface to learn on? I guess it was firmer than mud, but softer than asphalt.

"Hold down the clutch," Jacob said. I did so. "Now, this is crucial, Bella. Don't let go of that, okay? Pretend I've handed you a live grenade. The pin is out and if you let go, you explode."

I held it tighter.

"Good. Do you think you can kick-start it?"

"If I move, I will fall over."

"Okay, I'll do it. Don't let go of the clutch." He stepped back, and slammed his foot down on the pedal. There was a ripping sound and the force of the thrust rocked the bike. I started to slip sideways, but Jacob caught me and the motorcycle before it knocked me to the ground. "Steady! Do you still have the clutch?"

"Yes, sir!" I said. He grinned.

"Plant your feet, I'm going to try again." But he put his hand on the back of the seat, I couldn't help but notice. It took four more kicks before the ignition finally caught. I could feel the bike rumbling beneath me like an angry animal. I gripped the clutch until my fingers ached. "Try the throttle," he suggested. "Very lightly. Don't let go of the clutch."

I slowly twisted the right handle. Though the movement was tiny, the bike snarled. Jacob smiled broadly, clearly pleased with his handiwork. "Do you remember how to put it into first gear?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Go on, then."

I took a few deep breaths, and when I could see he was about to remind me, I kicked the gearshift down one notch. I didn't want Jacob to think I couldn't remember what he'd taught me already. "Good!" He said. "Now, very gently ease up on the clutch." He stepped back from the bike.

"You want me to let go of the grenade?"

"That's how you move, Bella. Just a little."

As I began to loosen my grip, it happened. The sandy dirt road and saturated green was replaced by a wholly different place.

In an instant I absorbed the entirety of the scene:

_A dimly lit room. A bed sat in the center, with dark and uninterrupted covers folded deeply over flat pillows. A generic watercolor painting of a river lay against the beige wall opposite the bed. There was a window facing a city street, framed by heavy grey drapes. It was obviously a hotel room._

_And standing in front of the window, long fingers holding the drapes apart, was Edward._

_He was wearing a pair of denim jeans and a white undershirt, his skin nearly as pale as the fabric. He was barefoot. His hair was shorter than I remembered it, and pushed to one side. He had a nervous habit of pushing through it with his fingers when he was anxious or stressed about something. His cheeks were flushed dark, almost like he was blushing, and his eyes were lighter than I remembered. They had lost some of their redness, instead looking like a dark shade of orange. Shifting back to the amber color I'd fallen in love with._

_Then he turned, faster than seemed possible, and set his gaze on me. "Get out." He hissed._

"Oh!" I said, my hand falling from the clutch. I was back on the dirt path, back with Jake in the woods. The bike bucked under me, yanking me forward and then collapsing on the ground, half on top of me. The engine choked to a stop.

"Bella!" Jake said, lifting the heavy bike off me with ease. "Are you hurt?"

I wasn't listening, my mind reeling from whatever I had just seen. "Bella?" His voice was worried now.

"I'm fine!" I said. More than fine. Even in the angry hiss, the voice still rang in my ears. Soft, velvety echoes. Edward. "Let's try again."

My mind ran through the possibilities. Was I psychic? Was it a hallucination, a dream? I felt the adrenaline coursing through my veins, and I didn't really care about the answer. Even though I knew it wouldn't change things, I had to try again. Maybe I could see Edward's face again, maybe hear his voice again. I couldn't keep myself from trying it.

"Did you hit your head?" Jacob asked, pulling me up. "Maybe you should rest for a minute,"

"No, I'm fine. I didn't damage the bike, did I?" I turned toward it again, my fingers reaching out to touch it, as if I would even be able to tell.

"You just stalled the engine," he said. "You let go of the clutch too fast."

"Let's try again."

"Are you sure?"

"I've never been surer."

This time I tried to get the kick start myself. I had to jump a little to slam down with enough force, and every time I did, the bike tried to fall over. Jacob's hands hovered over the handlebars, ready to catch me if I needed him. It took several good tries, and even more poor tries, but I did it. The engine caught and roared to life under me. Remembering to hold onto the clutch, I revved the throttle experimentally. At its snarl, my smile mirrored Jacob's.

"Go easier on the clutch," he said.

"_I don't want you in here._" I heard Edward's voice again, calmer but still angry, though the scenery around me didn't change. I smiled tightly. It was working. "_You had no right to do it._" The sheer beauty of the voice amazed me.

"Ease off slowly," Jacob said. Trying to focus this time, to not let the experience startle me again, I relaxed my hand by tiny degrees. Suddenly, the gear caught and wrenched me forward. And I was flying.

There was wind that wasn't there before, blowing my skin against my bones and flinging my hair behind me. I'd left my stomach behind, the adrenaline taking its place and roaring through me. The trees were a smear of green and grey, and over it all I could begin to see the outline of the other place, the room where Edward stood.

I realized that I could see both places at once. In part of my mind, I was with Edward. But my body could still see the path, the trees, the world flying past me. My mind had expanded somehow.

"_You had no right, Rosalie. No right. To call her – talk to her – how dare you!" Edward turned toward me_.

I realized that I was seeing as if from where Rosalie stood. Did Rosalie have some sort of vampire ability, too? Edward could read minds, could she project her thoughts? I didn't think so, Edward had never said that any of them had abilities but himself and Alice and Jasper. But I was only a human, so how could I access Rosalie's mind like this?

"_You didn't see her, Edward. She looked like hell. You could have done something, been easier on her with it all. I had to make sure she was okay."_

_"You didn't have to do anything. It's none of your business! Going to see her, calling her on the phone! You'll only make it worse."_

The vision was getting stronger, and I paid less and less attention to the road, letting myself see and hear and feel the room that Edward and Rosalie stood in. I could even smell it.

_The clean smell of the bathroom, the dusty scent of a place where people never stayed for long. And the smell of him._

_"I think you're wrong. Just like I thought you were wrong then."_

_"None of your business."_

_"Actually, it's none of yours. I only told you about it because I thought you should know what you'd done. But when you broke it off with her, you gave up any right to the relationship. It's my business what I do, it's your business what you do, and it's Bella's business what she does. Whether Bella and I talk has nothing to do with you. You hold no claim there." _

I was so absorbed with what I was hearing from Edward and Rosalie, I was caught by surprise when I realized that the road was starting a slow curve to the left, and I was still going straight. I couldn't think of how to turn.

"Brakes, brakes!" I said to myself, and I instinctively slammed down with my right foot, like I would in my truck.

The bike was abruptly unstable, shivering to one side and then the other. It dragged me toward the green of the trees, and I was flying. I tried to turn the handlebar the other direction, my heart in my throat and my panic such that my mind felt separated from my body. The sudden shift of my weight pushed the bike toward the ground, spinning toward the trees. The roar of the motorcycle seemed strangely far away, but the sound of hitting the wet sand and the slurp of my body through the grass and moss was right on top of me. I realized that I had hit something stationary. The bike was heavy against my torso, holding me down. Disoriented, I tried to lift my head, but something was in the way. Something else was making noise, but I couldn't pick up on it.

"Bella!" Jacob shouted, and I heard the roar of the other bike cut off. Oh. The other bike.

Then my bike was gone, pulled away from me, and I breathed. All the growling had gone away.

"Woah." I murmured. Adrenaline and danger, was that what caused the hallucination? Could I make it happen again? I was sure I could. It had to be possible.

"Bella, are you alive?" Jacob was crouching over me.

"I'm great!" I shouted, too loudly. My own voice rang in my ears, and I tried to stand up. I veered to one side, but Jacob caught me around the arms, holding me steady. "Let's try again!"

"I don't think so," Jacob said. "I'm driving you to the hospital."

"No, I'm fine!"

"Bella, you have a huge cut on your forehead and it's gushing blood. I'm taking you to the hospital."

I clapped my hand over my head, letting him guide me. Sure enough, it was wet and sticky. I could smell nothing but the smell of the grass and moss that the bike had propelled me through, and I was certain it was that alone that kept the nausea away. "Oh, I'm so sorry, Jacob!" I pushed hard against the gash, trying to slow the blood.

"Why are you apologizing for bleeding?" He wondered as he took the keys from my hand. He got me into the car, then pulled off his t-shirt and pressed it against my head. He put my hand against it, and I held it there obediently. He ran to get the motorcycles, looking athletic and professional as he drove them back to the truck. I was sure I hadn't looked like that when I'd ridden, but I didn't have the energy to be annoyed about it. He loaded them into the bed with incredible speed and sprinted to the driver's side.

"So. We need a cover story," I said as he turned the ignition. The roar of the engine drowned out his relieved laugh.


End file.
